J'aurais souhaité que vous me le dites.

English Translation

I would have wished that you had told me that.

souhaiter que = expresses a wish or desire so triggers the subjunctive. So dites (indicative) should be disiez (subjunctive), right?

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Yes

plus keep the concordance des temps:

J’aurais souhaité que vous me le dissiez.

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That made me flinch. I don’t think I’ve ever seen that. :slight_smile:

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English Translation

I would have wished that you had told me that.

que vous dissiez is more formal or literary? Is this better?

J’aurais souhaité que vous me l’ayez dit.

Wiktionary says (my bolding):

In less formal writing or speech, these tenses may be found to have been replaced in the following way:

past historic → present perfect
past anterior → pluperfect
imperfect subjunctive → present subjunctive
pluperfect subjunctive → past subjunctive

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English Translation

I would have wished that you had told me that.

Thank you very much for this. So “disiez” would be ok in less formal writing or speech. I did a search and Lawless French says a similar thing in stronger terms:

“The imperfect subjunctive is a literary verb form, meaning that it’s reserved for formal, written French…” and

“In today’s French, the imperfect subjunctive is replaced by the present subjunctive or past subjunctive,”

I’m not planning to do any formal writing in French soon, so I think I will just use the present subjunctive. - “J’aurais souhaité que vous me le disiez.”

In any case, dites (indicative) is the wrong tense here. Thank you all for doing the deep dive on this one.

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If you have a look at the Tatoeba page for this sentence, you can see that there a number of parallel translations using different forms of the subjunctive, by the same author.

https://tatoeba.org/en/sentences/show/1340776

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How could I have not known that he was the author?

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Or rather:

J’aurais préféré que vous me l’eussiez dit.

For the same reason :slight_smile:

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