English translation of "adlectio"?

[egfroth]

You can do this in English too, though it is rarely used nowadays ! Here is a famous military example by the Duke of Wellington at Waterloo in a scribbled order, written under fire, yet perfectly grammatically correct: "..when the roof will have fallen in, you must...." - a description of a future event in past tense! (future perfect tense)

Grammatically correct, but a bit clumsy. Nowadays we'd just say "When the roof has fallen in, you must . . ." and lose almost none of the sense - the future is "understood".

One thing that gets me is the "American conditional" - for example "If I would have gone to the shop. . ." Just sounds wrong.

Here in Oz, we'd either say "If I'd gone to the shop . . ." or if we were being pedantic "Had I gone to the shop . . ."