1

Possible Duplicate:
Why is “albeit” pronounced the way it is?
Why have the subjunctive and indicative converged in Modern English?
When should I use the subjunctive mood?

Reading the text I came across the following sentence:

The danger, all be it rare, is that one may compile the 100th expression only to find that one recompiles it and has to do the same work all over again when it may have been done 3 expressions ago.

My question is regarding the part of the phrase highlighted in bold.

What does it mean?

My guess is that it's inversion (inverted phrase "[though] it is all rare") But I don't understand why there is be, not is (all is it rare). And it looks quite strange to me.

Update:

Aedia commented that it's probably a misspelling of albeit.

I opened an etymology dictionary and found that albeit is a contraction of al be it, "al(though) it be (that)".

So, I still can't understand, why there is be (in the original phrase, from which albeit is derived from), not is?

Update 2:

After reading the linked questions, I still can't grasp what connotation subjunctive mood carries in comparison with indicative mood in this particular example.

In the linked questions one of the answer was that all be it = although it is that

But in the comments to this question there was a remark that be and is express different moods.

To express my question clear, I'll lay it out in the following way:

What is the difference with these structures?

  • The danger, although it be rare,...
  • The danger, although it is rare,...
Community
  • 1
ovgolovin
  • 415
  • 4
    I think this is a misspelling of albeit, which means although. – aedia λ Sep 22 '11 at 23:01
  • @aedia Isn't it that albeit appeared from all be it? Or their sounding the same is just a coincidence? – ovgolovin Sep 22 '11 at 23:04
  • @aedia Why did the author write all be it, not albeit? – ovgolovin Sep 22 '11 at 23:05
  • @aedia I opened the dictionary and found that albeit is a contraction of al be it. I'll update the question. – ovgolovin Sep 22 '11 at 23:08
  • This is not an exact duplicate of the other question; the other question is asking about pronunciation. – phoog Sep 22 '11 at 23:28
  • 2
    In addition, the OP is asking about the use of be versus is. The answer to this is that be appears here in the subjunctive mood, while is is the indicative mood. The other supposed duplicate question doesn't mention this at all. – phoog Sep 22 '11 at 23:30
  • @ovgolovin -- Please don't ask another user to answer a closed question in comments. –  Sep 22 '11 at 23:59
  • @simchona And where should I ask him? All the linked questions don't answer completely what I want to ask. – ovgolovin Sep 23 '11 at 00:51
  • @ovgolovin Then clearly, please, explain what you're still unsure about and users can vote to reopen the question. Answering closed questions in the comments defeats the purpose of this SE. –  Sep 23 '11 at 01:08
  • @simchona I made an update 2. I decided it'll be more straightforward to use 2 similar phrases: one with is and the other with be. So by juxtaposing them it's easy to grasp the idea of why subjunctive is used in the original phrase. – ovgolovin Sep 23 '11 at 01:38
  • @ovgolovin Great. Now users can vote to open if they think it's a different question. I think it's interesting, so we'll see what happens. –  Sep 23 '11 at 01:38
  • @simchona Ok, Thanks! I want to ask: how do they know that they should voute? And one more question: What does OP mean? (it was used by phoog in the comments here). – ovgolovin Sep 23 '11 at 01:40
  • @ovgolovin Users with more than 3K rep can vote to open/close questions (until you get to that point, you won't be able to see these votes). It takes 5 users to open or close; but a mod can close/open things by themselves. An OP is "original poster", usually. –  Sep 23 '11 at 01:42
  • @simchona Thanks! I would never guess myself what OP means (I'm not a native). – ovgolovin Sep 23 '11 at 01:44
  • @ovgolovin Sorry to have confused you. OP is in quite common use on stackoverflow so I assumed it was here, too. – phoog Sep 23 '11 at 21:13
  • @phoog Yeas, I saw it on StackOverflow once. But I didn't understand what it meant that time. And when I encountered it here I decided to ask. Now I know! – ovgolovin Sep 23 '11 at 22:06

0 Answers0