Irrelevant to the content of this article, which discusses historical What If scenarios, but this title and another front page story today (https://news.ycombin

Irrelevant to the content of this article, which discusses historical What If scenarios, but this title and another front page story today (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8353881 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8353881) reminded me of the following: Not all languages have built in counterfactual constructions, an example is Chinese (Mandarin). Starting in the 80s and continuing into the 90s, there was a big debate about whether Chinese speakers were at a disadvantage in quickly understanding complex counterfactual statements. During those times such suggestions were relatively taboo (especially due to Chomsky's strong anti-linguistics relativism stance) but that has relaxed considerably due to the work of many researchers. A recent paper summarizing the debate on Chinese counterfactuals can be found here (http://groups.psych.northwestern.edu/gentner/papers/YehGentner05.pdf http://groups.psych.northwestern.edu/gentner/papers/YehGentn...). An example from that paper that compares a counterfactual statements in English and Chinese: “If I had gone to the movies that evening, I could not have had dinner with my mom.” The counterfactual mode is signaled by having the verb of the suppositional clause in the past perfect tense and that of the main clause in the conditional form. The Chinese equivalent is “Ru guo wo na tien wan shan qu kan le dien ying, wo jiu bu neng gen wo ma qu chi wan fan.” This translates roughly to the English: If that night I go watch (past particle) a movie, I then cannot accompany my mom to go eat dinner. In Chinese, which lacks verb inflections, a counterfactual is signaled by comparing the tense information—e.g., the past tense particle (le) after the verb—with contextual information as to whether the event actually occurred. The second clause is simply a consequence clause; it has no internal marker of counterfactuality.