I mentioned this in another question, but just because the morphological inflection is disappearing, that doesn't mean the subjunctive mood is actually disappearing from the language. Just like when most of our verbal inflection disappeared (now it's "I go", "you go", "we go", "they go"), that doesn't mean we lost verbs for first person singular and plural, 2nd person, and so on.
Nohat's short answer gives the main point — if 9 out of 10 times the form looks identical to a MUCH more common form, then over time things might converge and regularize. A linguist would call this "paradigm leveling". Less common words and structures tend to regularize faster than more common ones (which is why words like "to be" and "to have" are irregular in so many different languages). The subjunctive is rare and not that distinct in English, so it is in trouble.
We see the past subjunctive form only in "to be", but we see the present subjunctive in the third person singular form of any verb — it has no "s" at the end like the indicative form.
So, this is of course subjunctive:
If I were ten years younger... (often said "If I was...")
But this is subjunctive too:
So be it.
It's important that he arrive on time tomorrow.
There are a bunch of examples here that include this other kind of subjunctive. This is just anecdotal but I haven't noticed this one disappearing as much.
Is this a general trend in related languages? Well, in Swedish this seems to be happening. In German one subjunctive form is used all over the place, and the other is used pretty much just in newspapers and journalism in general, but it is at no risk of dying out (it has legal implications akin to those that make the word "allegedly" so important in English journalism).
Merriam-Webster Online gathers several related senses of take:
11 b (1) : to obtain as the result of a special procedure : ascertain <take the temperature> <take a census> (2) : to get in or as if in writing <take notes> <take an inventory> (3) : to get by drawing or painting or by photography <take a snapshot> (4) : to get by transference from one surface to another <take a proof> <take fingerprints>
The common meaning here is to record something by procedure or writing instrument.
I hadn't previously seen the uses take a painting or take a drawing, so I consulted Google books and found that taking a drawing was common in the 1800s, during the rise of photography. This sense of take appears to have arisen in the late 1700s; note this example from The New-York Magazine or, Literary Repository (1792):
Mr. Peale, we hear, is engaged to take a painting of this extraordinary person, to preserve to future time the features and form of a person furnished with nerves and constitution to exist to so surprising an age, on that ocean of time which has long ago swallowed up so many millions of his contemporaries.
While making a drawing was always more common than taking one, I suspect that the latter usage took hold for photographs because the process of capturing (taking) a photograph is distinct from printing (making) it, and the taking happens when you open the shutter.
Best Answer
Such words existed in Early Modern English (roughly 1450–1650), and they were… yes and no. However, the answers to positive questions at the time were yea and nay. You could summarize their use as such:
It is well detailed in this Wikipedia page (which I first read in an answer by z7sg earlier today):
As you noted Modern French, as other languages, has a three-form system where both negative answers are the same (oui is the affirmative answer to a positive question, si is the affirmative answer to a negative question, and non is the negative answer to any type of question).