UKH

Grammar experts/pedants please let me have your opinion.

2019 KS2 SATS question: What kind of clause is underlined (in bold) in the sentence below?

If they could afford to, the ancient Romans ate well.

I would say it is a  conditional  clause under the umbrella of being a subordinate clause. The mark scheme, however, which is adhered to very strictly, only accepts subordinate.

Any thoughts?

To my mind, clearly conditional. If... then...

Why do 10 year olds need to know this?  

It appears to me to be conditional but I didn't learn this so I don't know.  

Because back in the day Gove thought it was a good idea!

If this were my latin GCSE I would have put subjunctive. However in the context of the English language I would argue this isn't subjunctive at all.

Subjunctive in English implies that the situation described is unlikely, clearly that is not the case here. Clauses using "could" in this way are generally ambiguous; it is possible for this sentence structure to be in the subjunctive, conditional* or even potential mood.

*NB the conditional mood in English is a bit weird as it doesn't result from verb changes.

So no actual reason then?   

He wasn't allowed to bring in fagging and beating so he went with grammar!

Were they able to afford it, the Romans would have eaten well.

Verb changes, but still weird and doesn't really work in this example!

The original example is pretty clunky too.  How about:

'Of those who could afford it, Ancient Romans ate well' ?

When I see "of those" I expect to see a subset, as in "of those Romans who could afford it, only some ate well".

How about "Those Romans who could afford to eat well did"

He would have had to run it past SPAD Dominic Cummings first. In relation to education, Dom is on record as saying "We need leaders with an understanding of Thucydides and statistical modelling." They seem to have done better on the Thucydides than the stats.

Yes.  The problem is trying to construct it as a subordinate clause.  The original question had the air of something set by someone who didn't fully understand it themselves. 

A subordinate clause is a clause that doesn't work by itself. e.g. "If they could afford to." should not really be a free standing sentence (you can use it as an answer to a question "Did the Romans eat well?" but it assumes a main clause that should go with it!).

A conditional clause is one kind of subordinate clause (like a temporal clause, concessive clause etc.): the mark scheme should accept both answers. It is a conditional clause (because of "if") and it is therefore also a subordinate clause.

If we are hitting higher level pedantry, I think "conditional sentence" is better than "conditional clauses", because in a conditional sentence the verbs of both clauses are affected. For example, the open condition: "If they could afford to, the Romans ate well"; closed condition "If they had had the money, the Romans would have eaten well." First indicative, second subjunctive.

All this is very Latin based. I'm sure an English teacher would explain it differently.

I don't suppose they need to know it along with a lot of other stuff they are taught but if nothing else, it will make teaching them foreign languages a lot easier if they have a better understanding of how languages work.

Thanks that makes sense.