Jussive mood


The jussive is a grammatical mood of verbs for issuing orders, commanding, or exhorting. English verbs are not marked for this mood. The mood is similar to the cohortative mood, which typically applies to the first person by appeal to the object's duties and obligations, and the imperative, which applies to the second. The jussive however typically covers the first and third persons. It can also apply to orders by their author's wish in the mandative subjunctive, as in the English, "The bank insists that she repay her debt."

Examples

German

In the German language, the jussive mood is expressed using the present subjunctive. It is typical of formal documents or religious texts, such as the Bible. Because it was more common in past centuries, it has often survived in proverbs:
It is still common that recipes are written in jussive mood:
Apart from that, jussive mood is still quite common in contemporary German. However, the pronouns he, she, and it might not be used directly; otherwise jussive would be mistaken for a dated form of courteous imperative. Instead, they will have to be replaced by "who", "someone", "everyone", "the new colleague" and so on:
Finally an example for jussive that would have served as a courteous imperative when addressing people of lower, but not lowest, rank:
Note that Er is written in capital letters here. Even if this construction is not used anymore in common German, it will be recognized as being an imperative.

Latin

In the Latin language, the present subjunctive can convey jussive meaning in the third person :
A jussive use of the present subjunctive is also attested for the second person in sayings and poetry, as well as in early Latin.
The jussive mood in modern Russian serves as an imperative, but covers third person instead of second person. Always formed with a particle пусть, which is derived from the verb пускать.

Finnish

While there is a separate imperative form in Finnish, the jussive mood is used for the third person, where the imperative is not suitable. The jussive's ending is -koon ~ -köön in the singular and -koot ~ -kööt in the plural. The jussive can be used to express speakers' positions or opinions that somebody is allowed to do something or that somebody is expected to do something.
The jussive mood, called the volitive in Esperanto, is used for wishing and requesting, and serves as the imperative. It covers some of the uses of the subjunctive in European languages:

Arabic

Classical and Standard Arabic verbs conjugate for at least three distinct moods in the imperfect: indicative, subjunctive and jussive. In the dialects, these moods are not morphologically marked.
The jussive is used after the preposition li- 'to' to express a command to a third person.
A further use of this mood is in negative commands.
The jussive form is also used in past tense sentences negated by lam.

Hindi

For the non-aspectual verb forms, Hindi uses the subjunctive forms as imperatives for the formal 2nd person and the 3rd person singular and plural grammatical persons.