Dear B J:

You wrote:

> Many uses are out of style, but still gramatically
> correct; doing toefl exercises i found it is not
> correct to use inversions in 1st conditional, such as:
> ‘Wow, can he make the audience laugh!’, ‘Has he more
> money, he will buy a house’; the first sentence sounds
> ok to me; the second one, although somehow out of
> style, could be grammatically permissible, and that’s
> my problem; is it also grammatically correct?

The first example is still standard English. The second makes no real sense in English, though I suspect it might in other languages that retain the subjunctive. Now the sentence would make sense if the main clause were in the conditional and the first clause in the past tense. (That is the case because historically the conditional originally was the past tenses of “will,” “shall,” and “can,” so even today they only “sound right” with the past.)

No native English speaker would ever say, “Has he more money, he will buy a house.” It makes no sense in the indicative. It does make sense in the conditional: “Had he more money, he would buy a house.” This is not commonly
used, but it is still understood. In virtually all cases people use “if” instead of the inversion: “If he had more money, he would buy a house.” Notice that even here the past tense goes with the conditional.

Another possible way of saying it might be “If he were rich, he would buy a house” or “Were he rich, he would buy a house.” Again, even with the verb “to be,” the first clause is in the past tense and the main clause is in the conditional.

Note the use of the perfect tenses in the following sentence: “If he had had money, he would have bought a house.” It is also possible to say, “Had he had money, he would have bought a house.” The important thing is that the tense match the conditional tense, which is either past or past perfect. There is no “future conditional,” since the conditional already suggests something that might be possible in the future.