How do I express a hypothetical? How do you phrase “would”?

2 comments

1. The question you wrote in Japanese is more directly translated as “why do (you/I) want to marry someone else?” As in, you are lamenting the fact that you want to marry someone over a different person.

   To think of it syntactically, your hypothetical question is asking for a reason to marry someone else instead of whomever you are wanting to marry. So to make that meaning more clear, you could say “他の人と結婚したい理由があるの？” Literally, “is there a reason for me to want to marry anyone else?”

   I think the confusion mainly comes from the use of the word “why” in the English version. While in most cases it *is* translated as なぜ, etc., here it is the phrase “why would I” that needs to be translated as a whole rather than separately in order to keep the meaning consistent.

2. You’re basically asking how to translate the subjunctive mood. The subjunctive mood is basically how we express hypothetical situations via grammar. In English the subjunctive is indicated by using words like “would” and “could.”

   Compare:

   If I go to the store today, I will buy bread.

   If I went to Disney Land today, I would meet Micky Mouse

   The first sentence is the indicative mood (ie how we normally talk). Going to the store and buying bread are totally things that are possible for you to do. The second sentence though expressing something hypothetical and likely impossible (Disney Land is far away and expensive). Notice how “go” and “will” in the first sentence became “went” and “would” in the second sentence. This is because the second sentence is in the subjunctive mood.

   If we were in LA and going to Disneyland was a real possibility, we could put the sentence in the indicative and say

   If I go to Disneyland today, I’ll meet Micky Mouse.

   So in this way, using just grammar, English can express whether or not we think a statement is realistic or likely to happen or not. A student confident in their abilities might say “If I can an A on the test, I will ~” whereas a student with low confidence would say “If I could get an A on the test, I would ~” The confident student thinks getting an A is pretty likely, the unconfident student views getting an A as an impossibility. As a result the grammar they use to talk about the same event differs

   Now that we’ve finished that mini English grammar lesson: **Japanese does not have a subjunctive mood** Unlike in English, in Japanese you can’t indicate that you think something is unlikely to happen or impossible or hypothetical just by using grammar.

   So to answer you’re question, you can’t express that “would” in Japanese because it represents a grammatical feature of English that doesn’t exist in Japanese