Shoulda, coulda, woulda...

So, the other night I learnt that Estonian only has one conditional past tense form of verbs.

This is vaguely laughable. Estonian has fourteen cases while English barely has four (and only really uses them for personal pronouns). Estonian has two forms of the infinitive while we only have one, and 6 present tense forms while we only have two. Estonian has 32 letters in its alphabet, while we only have 26.

And yet, while English has four different past tense conditionals, Estonian only has one. I feel like saying: "Are you sure about that? You don't have another six conditionals tucked away somewhere?"

But, it's got me thinking about the PT conditionals we use. My Estonian teacher never learnt the difference between the three rhyming words (would, could, should). At TAFE, where she studied English, they never covered the variations between them. I don't know about "might" - we didn't talk about that one.

But, for anyone else who isn't sure about the difference, here's a simple(ish) explanation:

Should = shall
Would = will
Could = can
Might = may (sort of).

"I should have gone" is connected to "I shall go".

"I would have gone" is connected to "I will go".

Sadly, we don't really use "shall" as much as we used to, so a lot of people don't get the subtle difference between "shall" and "will". Think of it as the difference between destiny and desire. "I shall go" implies that it is supposed to happen, whereas "I will go" originally implied something that you want to happen. "Will" is a word we stole from the Germans and it originally meant "want" - think of the sentence: "it is my will that this should happen". We kinda stole "shall", too, from the German word "sollen".

Of course, in modern colloquial usage, "will" has long since subsumed the meaning of "shall", and now it covers both concepts - except in the past tense. I love the way we have the left-over remains of long-dead concepts still kicking around in our language.

But it's probably worth remembering the classic line from Cinderella: "You shall go to the ball!" There's something definite in that...

"I could have gone" is connected to "I can go".

"I might have gone" is connected to "I may go"... Except it really isn't.

"Can" and "may" are two more words where one has taken over the meaning of the other. "Can" is, of course, whether you are capable of doing something, while "may" is whether you are allowed to do something. These days, "can" is used to cover both meanings - and, even in the past tense, people often use "could" when they once would have meant "might".

"I should have gone to the ball..." (I was really supposed to go, but I didn't)
"I would have gone to the ball..." (I wanted to go, but I didn't)
"I could have gone to the ball..." (I had the opportunity/ability to go, but I didn't)
"I might have gone to the ball..." -- Okay, actually this one is a bit weird. While "might" is technically related to "may", it's actually slightly off kilter - more closely related to "maybe" than "may".

No one ever actually says "I might have gone to the ball" and means "I was allowed to go, but didn't". Usually, "might" is just a catch-all conditional - a way of saying it is/was/could be possible, but there are no guarantees. It has well and truly lost it's connection with "may" in this case, and is more of a pure and true conditional than the others.

While I could potentially say "Oh, yeah, I should have gone to the ball" and the sentence can stand on it's own, if I say "I might have gone to the ball" I really need to follow it with the reason why I didn't: "I might have gone to the ball, if not for those pesky kids!"

In this way, it could cover any of the meanings of should, could or would. It just shouldn't.

The strange thing is, that "might" often carries the meaning of "can" in practical use, while "could" often carries the meaning of "may". "I asked my mother if I could go to the ball, and she said I could - as long as I cleaned up my room, first." As opposed to "I might be able to go to the ball, if I can get a good dress."

The English language is an odd thing.

By the way, one last thing:

It's "would have" NEVER "would of". Same for the others.