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In English, "what if...?" is a succinct way to ask what would happen if some counterfactual happened to be true.
Is there an idiomatic equivalent in Latin? The sequence of tenses gives plenty of options for expressing different types of conditionals. But is there a short and easily-understood way to turn such a conditional into a question?
The phrase quid si (hundreds of examples) was not at all unheard of. It works for both possible and impossible conditionals, and impossibility is best expressed by choosing perfect or pluperfect conjunctive. This is what Cicero would do, too.
An artificial example:
What if he were in Rome now?
Quid si ille Romae nunc esset?
