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Originally Posted by MrPedantic It is a proverb; but maybe it's too unfamiliar to appear 'universally true'. Let me try some parallel examples:
1. If a person has died, he is no longer alive.
2. If a person has not arrived on time, we say he is 'late'.
3. If MS Excel has not been installed on your pc, you can't open an Excel spreadsheet.
It seems to me that these can only be zero conditionals.
MrP |
What if those things have not happened? The condition is that they have happened.
1. If a person has died, he is no longer alive.
1A. If a person dies, he will no longer be alive.
Would you call 1A a zero conditinal? It means the same thing as 1.