Discussion Forum—A Way with Words, a fun radio show and podcast about language

Emmett, you may have been just kidding, but you got me started on a train of thought.   The correct form would be "I wish I had seen it 7 months ago", at least if you mean what one usually means.   That's asking for something impossible; by contrast, "I wish I saw it 7 months ago" sounds like you think it may be possible, as though a djinn is standing in front of you offering to change the past (if indeed djinni could do such a thing).

I've never tried to define this formula before, but some of you may be able to confirm my suspicion that "I wish I had seen" is the past conditional.   In English we make the present conditional with "would":   "I would do the same thing this way", for example.   I suppose this mood is called "conditional" because there's always an implied "if" around somewhere.

The past conditional is "I would have done it this way".   (Hmm, so maybe "I wish I had seen it" isn't conditional after all.)   And is there a future conditional, or is the very nature of the conditional mood inconsistent with events still undetermined?   I see a number of languages at http://www.verbix.com/languages that have conditional, but they're always only past and present, so maybe that's just the way conditional is.

Ok, so if I've convinced myself that "I wish I had seen..." isn't the past conditional, what is it?   Let's see, the same thing in the present tense would be "I wish I were seeing".   Let's switch to "be"; "I wish I were a better person".   It's an impossible desire; if I thought it were possible I would have said "I want to be a better person".   The equivalent in the past is "I wish I had been a better person".   So what is that called?

Just to make this a little longer, I remember once in college and on my way to work (at a McDonald's, I think), a coworker in the same car with me said "oh, I wish today there will be....".   I don't remember what the rest of the sentence was now (college was a long time ago), but what caught my attention was that this foreign student (from Colombia, maybe, unless he was one of my Iranian friends) was trying to express a strong desire and used "wish" in what must have seemed to him a perfectly reasonable way.   But we use "wish" only for things that we don't think can happen; he meant "hope", but it came out oddly.

Oh, is that another use of the subjunctive?   This is part of it that I never got straight.   Here's what I can see:

1) When speaking of things not as they are but as they might be, we use the subjunctive.   For example:
"Can you look outside and tell me whether it be raining?"
"It is important that your seatbelts be fastened at all times."

2) When speaking of things not as they might be but as they definitely are not, we use this other thing:
"I wish it were raining."
"If we had ham we could have ham and eggs, if we had some eggs."

...and in the past tense:

"I wish it had been raining."
"If we had had ham we could have had ham and eggs, if we had had some eggs."

Now, what I've always noticed about this "impossible" thingy is that we use the past tense for preset impossibilities and the past-past (the pluperfect, I think it's called) for past impossibilities.   So if both uses are subjunctive, I guess it looks like this:

Is that all it is?

Here's how I understand it (but I'm willing to listen to contradiction):   When we're speaking of things that might be, we use the present subjunctive:

The verdict of this court is that you be hung by the neck until dead.
May he live in interesting times.
God bless you.

When speaking of things that are definitely not, we use the past subjunctive:

I wish I were with you.

In the past tense, we use the past subjunctive for things that might be and the past-past ("pluperfect", I think it's called) for things that are not:

The lieutenant ordered that he remain in his room until sent for.   [I'm most willing to be contradicted on this point; it implies that the past subjunctive for most verbs is the same as the present, but I'm not convinced.   And Verbix seems to contradict me; it could be I'm doing this part wrong.]
I wish I'd been with you.

In your example, "I wish it were sunny now", the wish is indeed present but because it is, so to speak, an impossible wish—that is, because the sentence is telling us not that it might become sunny if you wish it hard enough but that it definitely is not—we use the past subjunctive instead of the present.   If you thought you might make it sunny by wishing it—if a djinn were standing in front of you granting your wish—you could tell him "I wish that it be sunny now"....though in fact most people would use the past subjunctive anyway.   My assertion is that that's because most people aren't really familiar with the subjunctive these days, it having fallen out of common speech except in a few usages.