Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Language/2006 December 9

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December 9

Grammar question

Is the form "I wish I would have" grammatically correct? It is taken to mean "I wish I had" as far as I can tell. I can't see any logical reason for it to mean that, though. Is it just a colloquialism that has slipped in, or does it actually make sense? —The preceding unsigned comment was added by BungaDunga (talk • contribs) 04:26, 9 December 2006 (UTC).

There's no single standard of correctness: it depends on who you ask. I can say that I think it is an Americanism, and isn't found in British or other Englishes. (In my own dialect, it's "I wish I had've" or "had of", but that's almost certainly regarded as incorrect by prescriptivists.) --Ptcamn 05:15, 9 December 2006 (UTC)

Gaah! Mixing up "have" and "of" is a personal pet peeve... @_@ 惑乱 分からん 16:21, 9 December 2006 (UTC)

There's a long tradition of replacing "would have" with "had"... see Shakespeare for many examples, like "I had as lief the town crier spoke my lines" from Hamlet. There's a relatively short tradition of speakers replacing "had" with "would have", as in your example. Some kind of, "well, one implies the other, so it most work the other way too", I guess. —Seqsea (talk) 07:52, 9 December 2006 (UTC)

The Shakespeare quote is a bit off, in that here "had" is more or less the main verb, not an auxiliary. It shows a use of the subjunctive considerably more exotic and obsolete. "I had as lief" means "I would have as lief," i.e. "I would just as soon it be the case that..." This is the same conditional subjunctive you see in "But that were madness, sir!" meaning "But that would be madness." (I realize now that I'm assuming the original asker had a past contrafactual wish like "I wish I had not eaten the whole thing," whereas s/he could have meant "I wish I had a million dollars," which is present contrafactual, but my point holds, since you ought still to use the subjunctive in the protasis, but to find it in the apodosis, as in Shakespeare, is obsolete.) Wareh 03:57, 11 December 2006 (UTC)

We can have the prescriptivism debate or not, but certainly "If I would have..." and "I wish I would have..." do not appear in well-edited publications, lectures, etc. The expressions "make sense," since you've observed speakers using them to communicate. See further counterfactual conditional. Wareh 16:16, 9 December 2006 (UTC)

Call me a prescripitivist if you like, but I see it as a confusion as to where the subjunctive is most appropriate. "If I had come earlier, this wouldn't have happened" is OK. "If I would've come earlier, this wouldn't have happened", and certainly "If I had've come earlier, this wouldn't have happened" are not found in well-edited publications. JackofOz 00:52, 11 December 2006 (UTC)