# If such women died in battle



## Kurigram

Source:
5LB. Book of GRE(Graduate Record Examination) practice problems(Manhattan)

According to Mercy Amba Oduyoye in Daughters of Anowa: African Women and Patriarchy, the women of the Asante people of Ghana participated in war as nurses or in providing supplies, but only those who had not yet reached or who were past childbearing age. *If such women died in battle*, they died “as individuals and not as potential sources of human life.” 

As such, many old women engaged in valiant acts, sometimes sacrificing their own lives, to defend those they had given life to.


Can we infer for sure that such women died in the battle?


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## boozer

Yes, this is a zero conditional reported in the past tense and the 'if' can be replaced with 'when'. So some of them must have died, for sure.


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## Kurigram

How can we understand that it's a zero conditional "if"?


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## PaulQ

In the context, the establishment and lifetime of the Ashanti Kingdom was some 350 years. The Ashanti were, for about the first 150 years, an expansionist, warlike people. That the odd nurse did not die in battle in inconceivable.

On a grammatical note, as boozer explains, 'if' can be replaced with 'when'. In a non-zero conditional, it cannot: "If you were to go to town, buy me a hat." "When you were to go to town, buy me a hat."


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## RM1(SS)

Kurigram said:


> Can we infer for sure that such women died in the battle?


No, because no specific battle has been mentioned.


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## suzi br

RM1(SS) said:


> No, because no specific battle has been mentioned.



A rather confusing answer!
This is a point about your phrasing, Kurigram, not the thrust of your question. RM1 means you should ask:
Did they die in battle? (Which boozer and Paul have answered with Yes, they did.)


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## Thomas Tompion

I think RM1 is pointing out an inconsistency in the OP.

I wonder if Kurigram really intended to make a distinction between _dying in battle_ and _dying in the battle_.


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## Kurigram

Thomas Tompion said:


> I wonder if Kurigram really intended to make a distinction between _dying in battle_ and _dying in the battle_.


I meant the following-
Can we infer for sure that such women died in *the* battle?


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## suzi br

To be honest, from a purely grammatical point of view, looking at the IF bit.... which you highlighted, I'm not sure we can know the fate of any such women, despite what Paul and boozer have said.

The point is general. If an old or young woman were to die, her loss of life would be her own, without the  loss of any babies a fertile woman would lose if she were killed. That is true regardless of whether any women actually died or not.

However the extract goes on to say explicitly that older women did sacrifice their own lives.


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## Thomas Tompion

Hi Suzi,

I don't think one could say *When I went to France, I went to Tours*, unless one did actually at some stage go to France.  I think that is Boozer's point, and I agree with him.

It's inconsistent to say *When I went to France, I went to Tours, but I never went to France*.

Certainly the extract goes on to say that some old women did die in battle, but that point has been made already by the use of the zero conditional.


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## wandle

I would describe it as an open past conditional. The case is entirely in the past, and it is open because (as far as this conditional sentence goes) we do not know whether any such women did die. 
We have to wait for the subsequent sentence to tell us that some such women did die.

All that the conditional sentence tells us is that if any such women died, it was as individuals, not as potential child-bearers. This sentence is equally true whether some died or none died.

There is a discussion of open past conditionals on this page: Getting Your Tricky Conditionals Right


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## boozer

I would describe such a structure as an open past conditional only if the author really had no way of knowing what happened. If the author does know that nurses died and tells us so, for me this remains a reported zero conditional. There was a recent thread where I argued that a similar grammar structure was an open past conditional, but in it we had a situation where the author had no idea if ancient Athenians were or were not able to read something.


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## wandle

In the present case, the author makes two separate statements, one the open past conditional in which he does not disclose whether any such women died, and the other a plain declarative statement saying that they did. 

The author is not obliged to place all his knowledge in one sentence. He is free to hold some knowledge back and reveal it a little later.


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## wandle

This page, conditional clause By Richard Nordquist, quotes from _John Seely, Grammar for Teachers. Oxpecker, 2007,_ who describes this type as:
_Unknown past condition: we don't know the facts._
(The point made already in post 13 applies equally here: as far as the conditional sentence goes, we do not know the facts. This does not stop us learning the facts in the following sentence.)


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## Thomas Tompion

*If such women died in battle, they died as individuals and not as potential sources of human life, but none did die - *I'd say the but-clause was logically inconsistent with what went before.

It would be hard to communicate with someone who said many things like *If I went to France, I went to Tours, but I never did go to France*.


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## wandle

Thomas Tompion said:


> If such women died in battle, they died as individuals and not as potential sources of human life, but none did die - I'd say the but-clause was logically inconsistent with what went before.


A declaratory statement ('none did die') is naturally inconsistent with an open conditional ('if such women died').
They are doing opposite jobs.


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## boozer

Excellent point, TT. Besites, replacing 'if' with 'when' or n'whenever' fits the surrouding context quite well.


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## wandle

boozer said:


> replacing 'if' with 'when' or n'whenever' fits the surrouding context quite well.


Such replacements do not conflict with the context but they do alter the meaning.


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## boozer

wandle said:


> Such replacements do not conflict with the context but they do alter the meaning.


Something that alters the meaning so dramatically must conflict with the context. But it does not. Does that not strike you as odd?


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## wandle

boozer said:


> Something that alters the meaning so dramatically must conflict with the context.


Why must it? If you report a fire, you could report that a corner of the building teetered alarmingly.
To follow this with the statement that the building still did not fall would not conflict with the context.
To say that it did fall would not conflct with it either: yet the statements are opposite in meaning.


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## PaulQ

From http://www.english-test.net/forum/ftopic136885.html


> According to Mercy Amba Oduyoye in Daughters of Anowa: African Women and Patriarchy, the women of the Asante people of Ghana participated in war as nurses or in providing supplies, but only those who had not yet reached or who were past childbearing age. If such women died in battle, they died “as individuals and not as potential sources of human life". As such, many old women engaged in valiant acts, sometimes sacrificing their own lives, to defend those they had given life to.


This is a question of logic.

1. Those who "participated in war" stand a higher than average chance of dying during that war than they would have had they not participated.
2. The meaning "if=when" as explained by boozer is unassailable. Uncertainty would be created by "So if ..."
3. People die all the time from many, including natural, causes: to think that involving yourself, as an elderly woman, in "valiant acts" in a war would somehow confer immortality is wrong.
4. A conclusion is reached that "If such women died in battle, they died “as individuals and not as potential sources of human life"." The statement, "they died “as individuals and not as potential sources of human life."" would be one of many speculative conclusion if none had died. If it were one of many, none would have been mentioned or "their death had many advantages for the tribe" would have been used.
5. The icing on the cake appears in "As such, many old women engaged in valiant acts, sometimes sacrificing their own lives, to defend those they had given life to."

Examining the example sentence devoid of context is a mistake from which nothing useful might be gained. It is not a question of grammar but one of common sense - this sometimes happens.


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## boozer

But why should I be reporting a fire in the past tense and setting an open condition in the past tense while knowing full well that the building did not collapse?  Besides, reporting a fire is a one-off event while here we have the author recounting historical events spread over centuries. Habitual past, zero conditional, quite for sure.

Edit: cross-posted with Paul. I agree entirely.


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## wandle

The point of an open past conditional is that it leaves the factual question open: that is, undecided.
That is what this sentence is doing: 


> If such women died in battle, they died “as individuals and not as potential sources of human life".


It states what is true if they died. It is only in the following sentence that we learn that some died.

The context suggests to me that the open conditional is expressing the basis on which the community approved - or required - the engagement of women in battle. In other words, it analyses the mindset of the community as it contemplated the possible consequences of women taking part in fighting.


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## wandle

May I ask of those who disagree with the diagnosis of 'open past conditional' in this case: do you accept that there is ever any such thing as an open past conditional?


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## boozer

wandle said:


> May I ask of those who disagree with the diagnosis of 'open past conditional' in this case: do you accept that there is ever any such thing as an open past conditional?


I most definitely do.


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## PaulQ

To not answer your question, I don't think that agreeing or disagreeing with the 'open past conditional' matters. The sentence is not going to be used devoid of context.

You say





> The context suggests to me that the open conditional is expressing the  basis on which the community approved - or required - the engagement of  women in battle. In other words, it analyses the mindset of the  community as it contemplated the possible consequences of women taking  part in fighting.


And having done all that, the plan was _implemented_. It did not sit as an entry in some dusty tome. The Ashanti were not without intelligence. Experience had taught them that people died in wars and they could anticipate this continuing. The question then, for them, became, "We need to maximise our chance of winning and minimise our chances of dying out so, when it comes to nursing and food supply, whom can we most afford to lose?" They then applied hard logic: young, fit men were rejected as they were most effective at fighting and females outside childbearing age were selected. The ploy was implemented and worked.

If it had turned out that no person who either nursed or supplied food died, this would have been (a) remarkable (b) copied in all future wars the world over (c) the occupation of choice of the wealthy and powerful.


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## Thomas Tompion

boozer said:


> I most definitely do.


I'm sure I would too, if I knew what people meant by the form of words.


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## wandle

PaulQ said:


> I don't think that agreeing or disagreeing with the 'open past conditional' matters.


That is what will answer* Kurigram's* question, though:


Kurigram said:


> *If such women died in battle*, they died “as individuals and not as potential sources of human life.”
> Can we infer for sure that such women died in the battle?


If it is an open past conditional, that means we cannot infer from that sentence alone that such women died.

If the topic sentence is not an open past conditional, may I ask what is?


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## boozer

Thomas Tompion said:


> I'm sure I would too, if I knew what people meant by the form of words.


_We don't know if some of the dinosaurs had 'night vision'. If they did, it would be reasonable to further assume that they hunted at night. _
For me this is an open past condition because I genuinely have no idea if there were dinosaurs that had night vision. For me the condition is both open and pastand one could further speculate on the effects of this condition having been met. And it is completely impossible to change 'if' to 'when' here.


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## wandle

There seems to me a clear difference in this context between (a) 'when such women died, they died as individuals' and (b) 'if such women died, they died as individuals'.

Sentence (a) is reporting a fact.  It is a plain statement by the author, saying what happened. 
The author communicates his own understanding of the situation directly to the reader. Two parties are involved in the communication.

Sentence (b) is expressing the condition on which the community accepted the loss of such women as bearable.
The author communicates to the reader the community's understanding of the situation they had to face. Three parties are involved in the communication.

Both (a) and (b) are reasonable sentences in the context, but they mean different things. 
However, (a) fits the context less well, for two reasons: (1) it results in the same point (the fact that women died) being expressed twice; (2) it leaves the point of the conditional sentence unexpressed.


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## suzi br

Thomas Tompion said:


> Hi Suzi,
> 
> I don't think one could say *When I went to France, I went to Tours*, unless one did actually at some stage go to France.  I think that is Boozer's point, and I agree with him.
> 
> It's inconsistent to say *When I went to France, I went to Tours, but I never went to France*.
> 
> Certainly the extract goes on to say that some old women did die in battle, but that point has been made already by the use of the zero conditional.



I am in a discursive, not a certain frame of mind when talking about this! 
I see your point.
BUT
The OP has *if* not *when.*
If I went to France I would have gone as an individual, not as part of a group.

To me that is more like the original and does not say anything about what happened to any actual woman.


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## Thomas Tompion

suzi br said:


> I am in a discursive, not a certain frame of mind when talking about this!
> I see your point.
> BUT
> The OP has *if* not *when.*


Hi Suzi,

This was precisely the point.  In that zero conditional in the past form, _if _has the force of _when_.





suzi br said:


> If I went to France I would have gone as an individual, not as part of a group.
> 
> To me that is more like the original and does not say anything about what happened to any actual woman.


Granted that it has said, in effect, that when they died in battle, they died as individuals - whatever that may mean - it would be to go back on its word to say that none of them did actually die in the battle.  The fact that some did is entailed in that zero conditional sentence.

I'm not quite sure what you think your proposed mixed 2nd/3rd conditional means.





suzi br said:


> If I went to France I would have gone as an individual, not as part of a group.


The form is appropriate for ongoing circumstances in relation to a previous past event.

eg. *if you weren't so noisy, you wouldn't have had that complaint from the neighbours*.  The ongoing circumstance is your being noisy, and the previous past event is your having a complaint from the neighbours.

I can't see your suggested 'if I went to France' as an ongoing circumstance.  The form you've chosen is appropriate to conditions, habits, characteristics, not to events, I think.

All problems are resolved, of course, if you make your sentence a 3rd conditional - *If I had gone to France, I would have gone as an individual, not as part of a group. * Now, of course, the implication is that you did not go to France.


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## boozer

In fact, any example of an open past conditional in the first person is likely to sound weird and, to me, maybe even ungrammatical. There is one overriding reason for this - one simply does know whether or not one went to France.  We are not, of course, talking about severe cases of amnesia or drunken blackouts.


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## wandle

We could imagine Captain Schettino making a (conditional) concession under interrogation:

_Well, yes, if that was the ship's position, then I was in the wrong._

We can also make a well-known point in relation to another maritime disaster, the sinking of _the Empress of Ireland_:

_If the accounts given by the respective captains were correct, then at the moment of collision both ships were stationary with their engines stopped._
(Note that 'were' in each clause is simple past indicative.)


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## Thomas Tompion

One problem in all this is that some people fail to distinguish between true hypotheticals and assertive statements with the same grammatical form.

  The zero conditional may be particularly prone to such misinterpretation.

  Take a statement like* If we are wrong, I'm a Dutchman.*  Without thinking, one might take this for a zero conditional, but if it were a true inferential statement, it would have to be couched in 2nd conditional form: *If we were wrong, I would be a Dutchman.* 

  As it stands (in its false guise as a zero conditional) it attempts to establish a firm link between the obvious falsity of the conclusion and the truth-value of the opening, ie. to discredit the opening by infecting it with the obvious falsity of the conclusion.

  The zero conditional form usually establishes a firm logical link between the if-clause and the main clause.  If such a firm link is felt to exist, then, in a sentence such as this, the patent absurdity of the conclusion suggests a patent absurdity in the if-clause.

  In other words we are dealing with a logically disgraceful way of saying *We cannot be wrong*, the assertive statement falsely disguised as a hypothetical *(If we are wrong, I'm a Dutchman).*

  I don't think we can seriously for a second mistake the sentence in the OP for such a logical fetch:* If such women died in battle, they died “as individuals and not as potential sources of human life.” *

  In its zero-conditional guise the fact that some of these women died in battle is logically entailed, as becomes even more clear when we substitute *when* for *if* - our ability to do this is a defining characteristic of the zero conditional: *When such women died in battle, etc...   *

  Put this into the third conditional (to preserve its past-tense quality) and you completely alter its meaning: *If such women had died in battle, they would have died as individuals etc... * In this 3rd-conditional guise we leave open whether or not any of the women died, of course.

The fact that we cannot shift our true zero conditional into the appropriate other form (2nd or 3rd conditional) without altering its meaning, shows it to be a true zero conditional.  In the same way, the fact that we can shift the false zero conditionals into the other forms, to reveal their true logical status, shows that status to be unworthy, in my view, of entering into a serious discussion of this issue.


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## wandle

The topic sentence


> If such women died in battle, they died “as individuals and not as potential sources of human life.”


 is recognisable as an open past conditional, because it contains a past indicative verb in each clause and expresses a condition which may or may not be true.

 Another example: _If Richard killed his nephews, he was an appalling murderer._

A zero conditional, on the other hand, is said to contain a present simple indicative verb in each clause and to express a general truth such as a scientific fact or law. 

For example: _If water is heated sufficiently, it boils._

The commonly taught scheme of three or four conditionals (first, second and third, with or without zero conditional) is valid as far as it goes, but does not cover all types of conditionals.


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## boozer

wandle said:


> ...is recognisable as an open past conditional, because it contains a past indicative verb in each clause and expresses a condition which may or may not be true.


That is exactly the point. The logic of the text is such that the condition cannot be untrue because the author is telling us how and why it is true. He is further telling us that it was repeatedly true over hundreds of years. That makes it a reported zero conditional, not an open past conditional - there is not a shadow of a doubt in the author's mind that the condition was met on a number of occasions so it cannot be open.


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## wandle

boozer said:


> That is exactly the point. The logic of the text is such that the condition cannot be untrue because the author is telling us how and why it is true. He is further telling us that it was repeatedly true over hundreds of years. That makes it a reported zero conditional, not an open past conditional - there is not a shadow of a doubt in the author's mind that the condition was met on a number of occasions so it cannot be open.


Well, if I may say so, that illustrates where, to my mind, the misconception lies. 

The author's account lets us understand that such deaths did take place and no doubt repeatedly over a long period. There is no dispute that those are the facts. There is no dispute that the text as a whole conveys that message. The point is that the topic sentence does not say that deaths took place. It leaves that question open, by saying 'if such women died'. 

As mentioned earlier, there is no requirement (or indeed possibility) for an author to include every fact in each sentence. It is allowable to express one idea in one sentence and another in another sentence. This places on the reader the burden of having to see the two sentences as different, but that is in my view not too high a price to pay for clarity.

In this case, the two sentences are:
'_If such women died in battle, they died “as individuals and not as potential sources of human life". As such, many old women engaged in valiant acts, sometimes sacrificing their own lives, to defend those they had given life to. _'

The first expresses the community's conception of the condition on which it would be tolerable for women to die.
The second adds to this the historical fact that not only did the community think in such terms, but they actually put the conception into practice.

If the author had meant to say in the topic sentence that such deaths occurred, he would have written:
_'When such women died in battle, they died “as individuals and not as potential sources of human life.”  '_

This would have resulted in redundancy with the second sentence and the distinct separate expression of the community's conception of a tolerable basis for female deaths would have been lost. The topic sentence would have been changed into a mere observation from author to reader, as pointed out in post 30.


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## PaulQ

I seriously think that to ignore the meaning of "*if*" = *when or on the occasion that* is a mistake.


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## wandle

PaulQ said:


> I seriously think that to ignore the meaning of "*if*" = *when or on the occasion that* is a mistake.


'If' sometimes has that meaning, sometimes not. In the present case, if we read 'if' as meaning 'when', then (as explained in posts 30 and 38) the amount of information conveyed in the text is reduced and the amount of redundancy is increased. It seems to me both a less economical and a less informative reading of the text.


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## boozer

The next sentence uses the phrase 'as such' - rather loosely in my opinion, but the author must have intended it to mean something. What could that something be? The meaning suggested here is 'being exactly what is mentioned or suggested'
http://idioms.thefreedictionary.com/as+such
So what has been already mentioned or suggested? That women did die, of course. How was that mentioned? By using 'if' to mean 'when'. Zero conditiomnal reported...


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## wandle

I agree that the text uses 'as such' loosely. However, in the FreeDictionary link above, the phrase is used in its precise sense:

*as such*
1. being exactly what is mentioned or suggested 
_There's no dining room as such, but we've made a dining area just outside the kitchen._ 

That precise, exact usage can hardly be seen as an explanation of the loose usage in the text.

In my view, the text uses 'as such' loosely, to mean 'on that basis'. In other words, the second sentence is adding the factual information that people did indeed act on the basis of the conception expressed in the first sentence. It was not just a theory: it was actually put into practice.


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