The Conditional in German. 75 



the different auxiliaries. Naturally certain accessory ideas 

 join themselves to the periphrases which are developed in 

 every language for increasing the number of ways of express- 

 ing the different shades of thought. In sollen we have the 

 accessory idea of necessity, of must; in icoUen,the inclination, 

 the detevmi nation of the agent. Cf. the English sliall, icill. 

 In werden we have at first the idea of the inception of the 

 action, later the pure future idea. This differentiation had 

 already begun when the language, on account of the loss of 

 the endings, was seeking a modal form i o replace the fast dis-. 

 appearing conditional form, especially in the weak verbs (re- 

 dete) where Indicative and Conditional were indistinguishable. 

 Sollte and icollte, both of which had a general future mean- 

 ing, perhaps a common quality of the Imperative, Subjunctive, 

 Optative and Conditional and logically based on reason, as we 

 have seen above, were often used to supply this modal form 

 of thought. In the strong verbs, and in other verbs also 

 where the form was distinguishable, the real conditional form 

 was retained. Sollte and wollte soon fell into the same cate- 

 gory as red etc, which could not be distinguished from the 

 Indicative as a conditional form; but the peculiar appropri- 

 ateness of iccrden to express the true modal relation of a 

 Conditional was recognized and replaced nearly all other peri- 

 phrastic forms. Sollen is still used, as we have already stated, 

 though with a slightly different shade of meaning. 



Present usage presents two phases of the Conditional 

 ( kaeme, gaebe, wuerde kommen, wuerde geben and their com- 

 IDOunds); it is used in the independent and in the dependent 

 clause. It stands in the purely hypothetical period ( protasis 

 and apodosis) and both forms (simple and periphrastic) may 

 be used and are often interchangeable, though the simple 

 form is much more frequent than the periphrastic. But it 

 must be remembered that these two forms are not absolutely 

 identical in sense. The perii^hrastic form may sometimes be 

 preferred where the idea of futurity is prominent, e. g., lebtest 

 du noch, so wuerde ich dicli von dieser Zeit an lieben, "wert 

 thou still alive, I should love thee henceforth." Again for 

 formal reasons where the simple form would not be distin- 



