Many languages use past tense to signal that something is not fact, and nobody knows why.>If I had a million dollars, I would buy a house.https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Counterfactual_conditional#The_grammar_of_counterfactualityhttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Irrealis_mood
>>537108124This is a furry threadYou can't fool me, i'm part wolf
>>537108124Okay. Go on.
Finally a somewhat interesting thread instead of the learn French+German spam
>>537108343It's called fake past tense because it has nothing to go with being backwards in time. I find it interesting because some philosophies, spiritual traditions etc talk about how the present moment is the only thing that's real.
>>537108484There isn’t anything deep about narrowly defining “real”, which is all this proposition does. Besides, you can’t account for the present without a past, most generally being taken as the most apparent one (I am dripping wet in my home because I just took a shower) which coincidentally matches your recent memory. You can try, but you will always by necessity be introducing something beyond the present moment to explain it, even if you decide to deny the apparent past.You could always just adopt solipsism if such shallow and useless philosophy intrigues you. For what it’s worth, people also say “if I get a million dollars I’m buying a house”.
>>537108982No idea what you're talking about or how it's relevant. There are multiple types of conditional sentences. Not all include something counterfactual. Conditional sentences are also not the only type of sentences where past tense morphology is used to signal unreality rather than past time.
>>537109392> No idea what you're talking about or how it's relevantRather unsurprising, now that I think about it.
Bump
>>537108203This post gave me phantom pain in my tail
>>537111036dont sit with butplug in
>>537109392People are used to talking about things that could have happened in the past but didn't; if I'd aimed a little lower the ball would have gone in, if I'd turned a moment sooner I would have hit that guy. So when people talk about other hypotheticals they use the same words out of habit.
