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Suppose that I have a friend which I miss him very much and I am waiting for his call.

10 days later I see him in the university and I want to tell him that if he had known, how happy I would be by his calling, he would have called me(perhaps my sentence is grammatically wrong). so what is the sentence I should say?

is this correct?

If you had known how happy I would be, you would have called me.

and if it is correct why we use "you would have called me"?

1 Answer 1

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You would have called me is the correct tense.

However, it seems strange to say you would have called me as if you are in a position to understand what he would have done.

Instead, you would normally rephrase such a sentence so that the main subject and verb is yourself:

If you had known how happy I would be, I'm sure you would have called me.

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  • why not If you had known how happy I would have been , I'm sure you would have called me not conditionnal but past conditionnal because the event is not possible anymore
    – Yves Lefol
    Commented Oct 10, 2018 at 17:51
  • Yes, that also works. The subtle difference there is that, in that version, the happiness would have been fleeting rather than (possibly) continuing for more time. Commented Oct 10, 2018 at 17:57

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