@jayles - OK, I give you that, and I can see you might be right in making the connection to Old English. All I'd say is that I've never seen could and would described as being subjunctive in English in any grammar book, but then I, too, could be wrong.

I certainly wasn't saying there was a conditional mood in English, but that would and could equate to the conditional mood in romance languages.

I have a funny feeling that the editors of the Cambridge Grammar of the English Language don't have much time for the subjunctive either, as in other languages subjunctive implies some sort of doubt, yet that it is certainly not how present subjunctive is used in English.

Anyway, I think this has probably run its course, and that we should just agree to differ.

@jayles - I'm sorry to harp on, but I simply don't accept they are subjunctive in polite phrases either; as I said, they equate to conditional mood in other languages, especially those that use subjunctive a lot, such as French or Spanish.

I did quite a lot or research into the subjunctive for my blog post, and the only place I've ever heard it suggested that 'would' or 'could' can be subjunctive is in these pages (and not only from you, I hasten to add). Subjunctive is not simply a feeling, but a fixed set of grammatical forms of lexical verbs, now really limited to present subjunctive - 'He asks that we be ready to leave at eight' , the past of be 'were' and a few set phrases such as 'Come what may' and 'Heaven forbid'.

I think that when wolde was a past subjunctive of willan, willan was a lexical verb with the meaning 'to will'. It still is occasionally, as in 'He willed it to happen' or the rather old-fashioned 'I would that he were here'. And in that second one, would is followed by the subjunctive, so can't itself be subjunctive, I would have thought.

But will and would are now almost always used as modal auxiliary verbs, and as far as I'm aware, modal auxiliaries don't have subjunctive forms.

@jayles - I think it's a question of spelling. Fetus vs foetus rather than fœtus. Try doing a site search for fœtus the BBC or the Guardian and nearly all the results are for foetus. And remember that spellcheckers in browsers (what shows up when I'm writing in the comments box, are usually for American English).

@HS - it depends on what you consider correct or the 'true' pronunciation. Even if you're talking about Latin, there are problems: for example, caelis is pronounced completely differently by Classical Latin scholars (Kylis) and by those who use Church Latin (Chaylis).

Secondly, most vowel sounds have changed since the end of Early English, with the Great Vowel Shift. Recent productions of Shakespeare with input from David Crystal even suggest that there have been changes since his time. And thirdly, vowel sounds are often the main differences between different varieties of English: what is the standard pronunciation of vowels is often different for a Northern Englishman and a Southerner or a Scot speaking Standard English (think of 'poor'), a Brit and an American or Australian. Is bath with a long a any more correct than bath with a short a? I simply don't think it's possible to speak of 'true' pronunciation in this way.

@Rocky - I talked simply about social change happening at a societal change as a way of trying to explain the use of the word societal (so yes, I was very concerned with the language point); I wasn't trying to score any political points, unless talking about societal shifts is being political - I would have thought it was more sociological, myself. And I certainly didn't introduce politically-loaded words like indoctrination.

Now at the risk of sounding sarcastic, you really did make me laugh in your last comment (and I was being perfectly genuine, not sarcastic when I said I admired and laughed at Rashad's comment, where I thought he showed considerable and humorous restraint at his rough handling by Az)

You say 'I would suggest you go to a politics forum, and leave people interested in language alone, but you probably go to many forums, where you impose your rants.'

Sorry to say, but this is the only forum where I take part, and have been doing so regularly for four years or so, without ever having been accused of being political until now. I never comment on politics or the news, but do comment on a couple of language blogs, have my own language blog and teach English for a living, so I really don't think I can be accused of not being interested in language.

Yes, I do rant occasionally, but only against pedantry in language.

As for my comments 'not being the sort of thing one wants on a language forum' I hope you won't mind if I leave that to my peers, the other regular commenters on PITE, many of whom disagree with me on language points, but whose politics I have no idea about, to decide.

In a follow-up to the blog post in jayles' link, the writer, Glen J Player, seems to have given into 'the inevitable', and accepted mentee, because of its standing at Ngram. But he forgot to include protégé, and I'm sure HS will be happy to know that protégé seems to be making a comeback, both in BrE and AmE:

http://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=mentoring%2Cmentee%2Cprot%C3%A9g%C3%A9&year_start=1950&year_end=2008&corpus=18&smoothing=3&share=&direct_url=t1%3B%2Cmentoring%3B%2Cc0%3B.t1%3B%2Cmentee%3B%2Cc0%3B.t1%3B%2Cprot%C3%A9g%C3%A9%3B%2Cc0

@Rocky - UKIP if you want to, but I think some of us would prefer to keep this a politics-free zone. I could just as well say that Brits have been indoctrinated against the EU by the likes of the Sun and the Mail, but of course I won't. Because this is a language forum.

I think there are two different things here:

The first mainly affects British spelling - in faeces and foetus, the ligature (æ and œ) has a single vowel sound- 'ee' - /ɪ:/ in IPA; it's not pronounced as a diphthong:

/ ˈfɪsiɪz/ and /ˈfɪ:təs/

In American English this has been rationalised, and even in British English, fetus already seems to be ousting foetus, although faeces still leads feces, but I imagine it's only a question of time.

But the the ligature (æ) in archaeologist is sounded as a true diphthong - ay - /eɪ/ in IPA, and there is no need, even for spelling reformers, to change it. There is a possible alternative spelling in American English - archeology - but it doesn't seem to be used very much.

Looking at the examples of words that can be spelt with a ligature at Wikipedia, I don't think you can make any hard and fast rules (and we're mainly talking about BrE here).

True diphthongs will no doubt stay: archaeology

While historians and Anglo-Saxon specialists will talk of Ælfred, most of us think of Alfred the Great. On the other hand I imagine Caesar and Oedipus are cast in stone, as is Aesop, for Brits at least.

Some of British spellings will probably stay, simply because we like 'our' spelling - encyclopaedia and manoeuvre, for instance.

Others have already been largely replaced by their simpler versions - hyaena, mediaeval - a process which seems to have started at the beginning of the twentieth century. Others even earlier - chimaera.

And who now uses (even in British English) færie, fœderal, dæmon?

It seems to me that there is a historical process going on here, where many words have already lost their diphthongs, some, centuries ago. Others have been in the process of losing them for the last century or so, and some, like fixed expressions in the otherwise largely moribund subjunctive, will no doubt stay with us for a long time.

Although I don't agree with AnWulf's desire for wholesale spelling reform, I think in this case, when these old forms of spelling really are at odds with the sound of the word, we should just let them go quietly without too much fuss. I'm afraid I can't get worked up trying to keep spellings like foetus and faeces, which simply seem counter-intuitive to me.

Incidentally, I have just discovered that the word diphthong can be pronounced with an f sound instead of a p sound at the beginning, in both BrE and AmE, but I'm not aware of ever having heard it pronounced that way. (I reluctantly admit that I've probably been spelling it wrong all my life - another candidate for spelling reform, perhaps?)

@jayles -I think perhaps we're a little at cross-purposes. I was asking whether Headway said that C was the only correct answer, and that in other words A and D were wrong.

I'm afraid I disagree that the past forms of modal verbs are subjunctive. It is true, according to Online Etymology, that in Old English wolde was both the past tense and the past subjunctive of willan (although it doesn't mention subjunctive for the others). But that is true of all verbs except for be - the past subjunctive is the same as past simple indicative - which is why we use past simple in unreal present conditionals, but (formally at least) the subjunctive of the only verb left that has a distinct past subjunctive - be.

If you compare these past modals with languages that use subjunctive quite a lot, such as French for example, they equate more to the conditional mood rather than to the subjunctive. (In fact 'could have done / would have done' are sometimes called the Conditional Perfect). English is not considered to have a Conditional Mood though, as these forms are not made by inflection, but by the use of auxiliaries.

Compare real and unreal present conditionals in English and French:

If you come, we'll go to the cinema.
Si tu viens, nous irons au cinéma - si + présent, futur simple (just like in English)

If you came, we would go to the cinema
Si tu venais, nous irions au cinéma - si + imparfait, conditionnel présent

This is from Wikipedia:

"The conditional mood is generally found in the independent clause (apodosis) of a conditional sentence, namely the clause that expresses the result of the condition, rather than the dependent clause (protasis) expressing the condition. The protasis will often use a different verb form, depending on the grammatical rules of the language in question, such as a past tense form or the subjunctive mood."

And it's the same with polite forms: these verbs are in conditionnel présent, not subjonctif:

Could you open the door? - Pourriez-vous ouvrir la porte?
I should be grateful if ... - Je vous serais reconnaissant si ...

As they say at French Wiki:

"Le conditionnel apporte un degré de politesse de plus par rapport au futur, lui-même plus poli que le présent."

The only possible connection with the subjunctive I can see is with 'should', but it's not normally called that. At Wikipedia they say:

'The auxiliary should is used to make another compound form which may be regarded as a subjunctive, and in any case is frequently used as an alternative to the simple present subjunctive. For example:

With present subjunctive: It's important that he be cured.
With should: It's important that he should be cured."

The use of present subjunctive is standard in American English, but considered very formal in British English, where we tend to prefer the version with should.

This page collecting just about every conceivable possible example of the subjunctive has been put together by a subjunctive fan, and has no examples that I can see of past modal forms being labelled as subjunctive:

http://www.ceafinney.com/subjunctive/examples.html

For my sins, I've also written about the subjunctive, where I also speculate about should (mainly because of the possibility of inversion):

http://random-idea-english.blogspot.com/2011/06/exploring-grammar-subjunctive.html

You're quite right about overlaps and the necessity to use other forms for past tenses and with other modals, for example. And it's very true that context and intonation make a big difference. Here's just a few different meanings for 'must':

You must tidy up your room immediately, before Granny comes.- obligation
You must turn it on first or it won't work. - necessity
He must be about forty, I would think. - speculation
You really must see this new film. - strong recommendation
Must you make so much noise while I'm on the phone? - expressing annoyance

This is close to my heart at the moment, as I'm working on a sort of Ready Reference on modals for my blog.

@jayles - I haven't checked it yet, but I'm still not clear: were they saying there was only one correct answer, or that one answer was incorrect.

I still maintain that there is a difference in meaning between A and D, and C, so I don't see C as a less common alternative to A and D. As you say, D expresses annoyance (or lament) and I would see A as simply a stronger version of that. But C seems to me simply a question of fact, without necessarily telling us about the viewpoint of the speaker, and I think it unlikely we would use this construction to express annoyance, even by stressing 'have'. Some examples from the British national Corpus:

Will we have to pay double?
Will we have to show them our work?
Will we have to elope?

There are only three for 'Must we', which all seem to suggest that the speaker would prefer the answer to be 'no':

Well must we have chicken?
Must we have slurping noises?
I mean the public is going to say we must have houses, we must have roads, must we have arts?

And here are a couple for 'do we have to' that also express annoyance:

Do we have to go through all that again!
Do we have to have him here in bed with us?

@jayles- he has a great argument - somebody comes across a word they haven't seen before; they don't like it, or think that its construction doesn't follow a certain rule, so hey presto, 'it's not a word', despite having been around for forty years or so, and being listed in several dictionaries. Interesting about the origins of mentor, though.

Of mentee (and mentoree, which seems to exist, but is far less common than mentee), he says "Both of these constructs reflect the same kind of grammatical over extension toddlers make when they say things like swammed or runned."

What about looking at it another way - they reflect the sort of playful bending of the rules that people have been doing with English for centuries.

I thought the best bit was the comment by Daniel Greene, who actually does some mentoring (for interpreters) - saying that although he doesn't particularly like mentee, 'None of the other options above (protégé, student teacher, aspiring artist) fit peer-to-peer mentoring, either.' - I would think this is even truer of mentoring programmes in business. And that point about peer-to-peer is important: the huge increase in the use of the word mentoring (a more than forty times increase since 1980) is no doubt largely accounted for by peer-to-peer mentoring, where words like protégé don't seem quite appropriate.