Clauses containing a word for ‘if’ (Latin sī) are known as ‘conditional clauses’ because they indicate the conditions under which something is or would be true: ‘If the weather is good we shall have a picnic’ or ‘If he had come sooner it would have been a disaster.’ In order to translate Latin conditional sentences successfully it is necessary to understand how conditionals work in formal written English, though many spoken varieties of English diverge from this system significantly.
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