Subjunctives
Google thinks it's much more common for people to have asked whether it was than to have asked whether it were, as I just reported some of my friends did with respect to my Powerball on seeing it for the first time. A reader is having trouble with that subjunctive, though.
The reason I used the subjunctive there is not specifically that I thought it was appropriate, but that I was influenced by the cena Latina I attended yesterday. I formed a whole bunch of indirect questions during the cena with subjunctives, like "scire velim an rusticatio iam sit plena", "debeo rogare an possint pittam, aut partem pittae, facere sine caseo", etc. (In case you were wondering, the answers to these two questions turned out to be "no" and "yes", which were just the answers I had been hoping for.) There is some discussion in the Vulgar Latin book I've been looking at about the emergence of "si" to mean "whether" as well as the conditional "if" (compare Portuguese "se"), but I've been sticking with "an".
Anyway, I'm not sure whether English indirect questions should use the subjunctive or not. I just used the subjunctive there because I was still thinking in a Latinate kind of way when I wrote my post about the Powerball. I welcome other opinions.
