English Sentence
Whenever you find yourself on the side of the majority, it is time to pause and reflect.
Other sentences in the corpus lead me to believe that siempre que + subjunctive means “as long as”.
Whenever you find yourself on the side of the majority, it is time to pause and reflect.
Other sentences in the corpus lead me to believe that siempre que + subjunctive means “as long as”.
According to the Wiktionary page for siempre que it has both of those meanings (and the examples for each of those meanings use the subjunctive).
I think that in the case of whenever, the choice of mode follows the same rule as with cuando, depending on whether it’s forward-referencing or not.
https://www.rae.es/dpd/siempre:
siempre que.
Locución conjuntiva que tiene dos valores:
a) Temporal, con el sentido de ‘en todos los casos o en todas las ocasiones en que’. La oración subordinada que introduce puede llevar el verbo en indicativo o, si la acción está orientada hacia el futuro, en subjuntivo: «Yo, siempre que puedo, vengo»
b) Condicional, con el sentido de ‘con tal de que’. El verbo va siempre en subjuntivo
If one’s aim is to simplify such thorny choices, could one substitute ‘siempre y cuando’ + subjunctive for “as long as” while only using ‘siempre que’ (+ either ind. or sub., depending on the context) for “whenever”?
ETA: Just remembered that ‘con tal de que’ is another option for “as long as.” So I’m definitely going to eliminate ‘siempre que’ as an option for “as long as” from my mental bank. Too ambiguous for me.