Subjunctive

Proto-Indo-European

Among the Indo-European languages, only Albanian, Avestan, Ancient Greek, and Sanskrit kept the subjunctive and the optative fully separate and parallel. However, in Sanskrit, use of the subjunctive is found only in the Vedic language of the earliest times, and the optative and imperative were comparatively less common. In the later language (from c. 500 BC), the subjunctive fell out of use. The optative or imperative were used instead, or subjunctive was merged with optative as in Latin. However, the first-person forms of the subjunctive continue to be used as they are transferred to the imperative, which formerly, like Greek, had no first person forms.