konungursvia wrote
As I've said before, I'm not convinced these are subjunctives at all. They are past imperfects,
With all due respect, the enormous problem with this popular, but simplistic, analysis is that they do not refer, in any way, shape or form, to the past!!
Past subjunctives, on the other hand, in all Indo-european languages, do refer to the imaginary present/improbable future (see also below). They simply happen in English, with the exception of I/he/she/it were, to have lost their distinctively morphology.
If you are going to base your arguments on that kind of incidental, superficial evidence, you might as well argue that 'him' is not really an object form, just some kind of Scandinavian variant of 'he', and that direct objects do not really exist in English, as the majority have no distinctively 'accusative' form.
These are subjunctives consistent with other Indo-European languages. "If I were you" appears to bear no relation to any European concept of the subjunctive.
There, I'm afraid, you are quite wrong! In German, the closest I-E reative of English (indeed, a mere couple of millennia ago, effectively the same language), the hypothetical sentence
If I were a bird, I would fly.
would be
Wenn ich ein Vogel waere, wuerde ich fliegen.
as compared with a simple (and genuinely past!) indicative, such as
Ich war hier, als er kam.
(= I was here when he came).