Funniest joke on the internet
This one regularly resurfaces at /r/linguisticshumor/ and it's all over the web for good reason!
"I am the ghost of Christmas Future Imperfect Conditional, said the spirit...
I bring news of what would have been going to happen, if you were not to have been going to change your ways"
You know what's coming, don't you? How would we translate this into our darling Esperanto?
The conditional mood is marked with the -us ending, and in Esperanto it doesn't necessarily say anything about the tense of an action (past, present, future). So if we've got something like this:
li kurus se...
he would (have) run if...
See how kurus can apply to any tense, where for example in English we have to make the choice at least between present/future and past by whether or not we follow "would" with the word "have".
It's surprising how often you really don't need to know the exact tense to express the desired conditional idea. But when you do, you can use a helper word like antaŭe "previously", or rope in a participle construction: -int (meaning the action is completed) along with esti "to be":
li estus kurinta se...
he would have run if... (literally: he would be having-run if...)
This is a fairly common thing to do with the past tense as above, but you don't often see it elsewise. Either way though, we've got a clever joke to try to translate, which involves the overuse of unusual grammatical structures. So let's press on.
So far, we've covered the conditional side of things. But what about the imperfect (progressive)? The progressive talks about ongoing actions, i.e. the action didn't just happen in the time you're talking about, it was/is/will be ongoing at that time. In Esperanto, the simple tenses can already express the progressive:
ŝi kuras
she runs (but also the progressive: she is running)
And context will make it clear which you mean. But when it's important to emphasise the ongoing nature of the action, we return to participles. In particular, the -anta or -ata participles, which talk about actions that are ongoing (we'll stick with the active ones in this post, so -anta). Then we use esti to help us out again:
ŝi estas kuranta
she is running (the running is ongoing)
ŝi estos kuranta
she will be running (at this point in the future, the running is ongoing)
ŝi estis kuranta
she was running (at this point in the past, the running is ongoing)
Lastly, we've got to think about how to render the future along with these two concepts. And I don't think the simple future -os tense is going to help if we need to combine with some notion of an ongoing but conditional action.
We do however have access to the -onta participles for yet-to-be-started actions:
la kantonta sciuro sidis en la arbo
the squirrel about to sing sat in the tree
ŝi estas kantonta
she is about to sing
From the verb kanti "to sing". Normally, the -os is pretty versatile:
ŝi kantos
she will/shall sing
she is going to sing
she will be singing (progressive!)
she will have sung
I think if we were to ignore the fact that it's a joke, and try to clearly and most simply capture as much of the meaning of "what would have been going to happen", we'd have something like this:
kio estus okazonta
what would be (and technically "would have been") about to happen
Which is pretty damn close. But while "would have been" I think is technically a translation of estus, there's nothing there that is explicitly calling on the imperfect/progressive - no explicit marker that we're specifically talking about the ongoing state of being "about to happen". And since the joke is partly about being ridiculously1 punctilious, let's see how we might introduce that element more overtly.
We can do it by folding in on ourselves one more time. We can use the -anta trick to make a progressive out of esti itself!
ŝi estas estanta
she is being
ŝi estus estanta
she would be being, or more importantly: "she would have been being"
Being what? Being about to happen:
kio estus estanta okazonta
what would have been being about to happen
What do you think? You can read more about being specific about the timings of actions using participles at the PMEG.
mi estas la fantomo de kristnaska futura progresiva kondicionalo, diris la spirito.
I am the ghost of Christmas Future Imperfect (progressive) Conditional, said the spirit.
mi alportas novaĵojn pri kio estus estanta okazonta, se vi ne estus estanta ŝanĝonta viajn manierojn.
I bring news of what would have been going to happen, if you were not to have been going to change your ways
In case you're a sadomasochist2, it is technically possible any time you have an esti + a-word situation in Esperanto that you can drop the esti and move its verb ending to replace the "a" in order to verbify the a-word. But in most cases it's avoided with participle endings like -anta because it's just asking for confusion with all that meaning packed into a tiny space. So technically this is the equivalent: kio estantus okazonta!
1 I always remember that I spent so many years never seeing the link between something ridiculous and something that makes you laugh, until learning that Esperanto ridi is "to laugh".
2 sado-masoĥisto, I believe.
