"Optative" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... contend for five moods, two of which, the potential or powerful, and the subjunctive, are predicated on the same principles as Mr. Harris' optative, interrogative, etc., which they condemn. It is impossible to explain the character of these moods so as to be understood. If, it is said, is the sign of the subjunctive, and may and can ...
— Lectures on Language - As Particularly Connected with English Grammar. • William S. Balch
... this tense turned it into a preterperfect in middle Cornish, but in the later form re is only used for the optative. {119} ...
— A Handbook of the Cornish Language - chiefly in its latest stages with some account of its history and literature • Henry Jenner
... that other kinds of sentences, optative, imperative, interrogative, exclamatory, if they express or imply an assertion, are not beyond the view of Logic; but before treating such sentences, Logic, for greater precision, reduces them to their equivalent sentences ...
— Logic - Deductive and Inductive • Carveth Read
... appears to have been anciently used with cne, would that it might be! but now in general it is not so understood. The phrase may be deemed to be in the Optative, although it does not express that entirely, being formed by the union of the Imperative above with venesma, ...
— Grammatical Sketch of the Heve Language - Shea's Library Of American Linguistics. Volume III. • Buckingham Smith
... thy word, Alban!" Here the condition "if thou hadst kept, etc." stands without the consequence "thou wouldst not have died," or something of the kind. Such a condition may be expressed without si, just as in Eng. without "if," cf. Iuv. III. 78 and Mayor's n. The use of the Greek optative to express a wish (with [Greek: ei gar], etc., and even without [Greek: ei]) is susceptible of the same explanation. The Latin subj. has many such points of similarity with the Gk. optative, having absorbed most of the functions of the lost Lat. optative. [Madv. on D.F. ...
— Academica • Marcus Tullius Cicero
... Their verbs have four moods, the indicative, optative, imperative, and infinitive, and five tenses, one present, three preterites, and one future. The rules of their formation are simple. By changing the termination of the infinitive into a, we have the ...
— The Arawack Language of Guiana in its Linguistic and Ethnological Relations • Daniel G. Brinton |
