Latin Conditionals “if/then”

If/Then in Latin First off, this is a moment to step back, take a deep breath, and feel for a moment that your life isn’t as hard as your friends’ lives in other languages. Because Latin conditionals aren’t that hard. Spanish makes the tenses really hard in conditionals. French has a whole other verb form just for conditionals. Ancient Greek conditionals are an unimaginable nightmare. Call this your payoff for learning all those case forms!

Vocabulary A conditional sentence is just an if/then type sentence. In a Latin conditional, we call the “if” clause the protasis and the “then” clause the “apodosis”. General conditions are about the present or past. Future conditions are about the future. Unreal conditions are about what would have happened if things had been different.

General Conditions These are so simple you’ve probably already read plenty of them without having to be taught. If the whole thing is in the present, both verbs are present indicative. si vir servus est, non liber est. (If a man is a slave, he is not free.) If the whole logical relationship is in the past, then you can use either imperfect or perfect indicative, depending on which works for the specific actions. si vir servus erat, non liber erat (If a man was a slave, he was not free); si vir servus fuit, non liber fuit (If a man used to be a slave, he was not free [then]). Notice that, unlike English, do you not need a word for “then”.

Future Conditions These are the most common conditional sentences. Logically, you most often talk about “if/then” relationships when speculating about the future. There are two types: future more vivid and future less vivid.

Future More Vivid This is by far the most common conditional sentence structure in Latin. It’s equivalent to English, “If you do this, that will happen.” The only trick is that the Latin tense usage in this sentence is actually more logical than the English. Why, come to think about it, would we use a present tense verb such as “do” when the whole sentence is thinking about future possibilities?

Why We Need Future Perfect!! This is where the Latin future perfect tense, which some students may have spent a long time wondering why the Romans even needed, comes in handy. Future perfect tense, as you remember, is for a future action that is already over and done with BEFORE another future action starts. This means it makes perfect logical sense in an if/then sentence about the future. You need to do the “if” action before the “then” action can result! Because of this, most of the time these sentences will have a future perfect verb in the protasis, and a normal future verb in the apodosis. So, si Catullus carmina magna scripserit, homines eum laudabunt (If Catullus writes [lit. “will have written”] great poems, people will praise him).

Future Less Vivid This is less frequent and does not translate well into contemporary English. The best equivalent is “If she should do this, this would happen.” The tone is more speculative than the future more vivid condition. It’s not ruling out that the circumstance might happen, but the speaker is less committed. You most commonly construct this with present subjunctive in both protasis and apodosis. si vir servus sit, non liber sit (“If a man should be a slave, he would not be free.” Perfect subjunctive is grammatical, but rare.

Unreal Conditions These are very different logically from all the other kinds of conditions. In all other conditions, you are talking about things that are happening, did happen, or realistically could happen. The unreal condition (also called contrary-to-fact or contrafactual condition), though, is a speculation about what WOULD HAVE happened if something is/was true that is really false. It’s like reasoning about an alternate universe.

Present Unreal Conditions These are constructed with both protasis and apodosis in imperfect subjunctive. You can compare how you use imperfect subjunctive to mean “same time” in sequence of tenses, if you like the mnemonic. si septem annos haberem, non haec scriberem (If I were seven years old, I would not be writing this). Don’t be too confused with seeing “were” in a present conditional in English. Again, think about the logic--I am writing that sentence about myself, this moment (May 8, 2013), at which moment I am NOT seven years old. Present tense.

Past Unreal Conditions For these, use pluperfect subjunctive in both clauses. Again, you can compare the use of pluperfect subjunctive in secondary sequence for all “before” verbs as a mnemonic. si Cleopatra non femina fuisset, Romanos non tam graviter terruisset (“If Cleopatra had not been a woman, she would not have scared the Romans so badly.”) All of this is in the past relative to the moment of writing.