The cognitive approach to polysemous phenomena enables us to see this kind of evolutions as generally occurring in different languages.

It may account for the change (or extension) from a temporal to a conditional value in the case of the German conjunction wenn, as well as for the fact that the Catalan contextual equivalent of wenn in its conditional meaning is often the temporal conjunction quan.

But the temporal sense of als is also normally translated as quan, which contributes to make this kind of translation problem more complex. A further value of wenn (usually in combination with auch) is concessivity, corresponding to the Catalan encara que (`'even if ', 'even though').