The subjunctive, not a tense but (appropriately) a mood, connotes doubt, improbability, and false beliefs; its prevailing atmosphere is one of ambiguity. The subjunctive has largely disappeared from English, lingering only in grammatical niceties like, “If that were true, I would be the first to admit it.” In Romance languages, though, it is alive and well—the default idiom of dreams, hopes, suppositions, counterfactual situations, and disbelief.
