Use of past tense as a conditional?

Japanese Language Grammar
1

In the following conversation, where B lost his wallet and A returns it to him:

A: 「これを忘れていましたよ。」
B: 「えっ それは私のお金入れです。」
A: 「忘れたので、届けに来ました。」
B: 「まあまあ、ありがとうございます。このお金がなかったら、この先、宿のお金も払えません。食べ物を買うこともできません。伊勢神宮まで行くこともできませんでした。」

In the last sentence, B is talking about the consequences of having lost his wallet. I think about it as ‘I won’t be able to pay for a hotel, I won’t be able to buy food’, and so on.
Can somebody explain why is the verb tense the past (できませんでした)?

The structure なかったら …できませんでした here, is it similar to the English conditional: If it hadn’t … it wouldn’t have … ? , meaning 'If there hadn’t been money, I wouldn’t have been able to pay for the hotel, and so on?

Thank you.

1 Like
2

The conditional here is the ～たら in the middle.

Confess I’m not too clear on what the past tense is doing at the end. I guess it’s just creating a hypothetical - “I wouldn’t even have been able to…”.

(Though if someone said all that to me in English, I’d be going “… yeah, I know how money works.” Like, just give one example and leave it at that - “Oh what a relief, without my wallet, I wouldn’t have been able to pay for lunch” full stop.)

This wasn’t written by ChatGPT, was it?

4 Likes
3

Yeah they’re called counterfactual conditionals or something. I had one in my n5 quiz.

2 Likes
4

Vanilla and Belthazar, thanks so much. I didn’t even know the structure. Now, I know what I’m looking for.

5

Yeahh, there’s some weird word choices and the rigidness made me think of this as well.

1 Like
6

Googling says it’s from one of the tadoku.org graded readers. So I guess the slight oddness in style is probably because it was written to fit a difficulty level. It was written in 2016 so well before the advent of chatgpt.

2 Likes
7

Yeah, that was my other theory.

Or maybe that’s just what ChatGPT wants you to think…

2 Likes
8

Yes, it is from tadoku, level 3. I will take into account that it is not completely natural, thanks a lot.