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SHALL" AND WILL."

CHAPTER I.

2

"THEY may talk as they will of the dead languages. “Our auxiliary verbs give us a power which the "ancients, with all their varieties of mood and "inflection of tense, never could attain."1 Such are Southey's words, and I believe them to be true. The observations of a more distinguished philologist, William von Humboldt, may be quoted in confirmation of these views. Speaking of the transition from a synthetic to an analytic structure in language, he says, "The practical convenience of ex"pressing the sense supersedes the fanciful pleasure originally felt in combining elementary sounds "with their full-toned syllables, each pregnant with meaning. The inflected forms are broken up into prepositions and auxiliaries. Men sacrifice other advantages to that of ready understanding, for "without doubt this analytic system not only "diminishes the labour of the intellect, but in

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par

The Doctor, p. 1. What may be called our continuous present," "I am reading," affords a good instance of this greater precision.

2 Verschiedenheit des Menschlichen Sprachbaues, s. 284.

"ticular cases it attains a degree of precision which “is reached with greater difficulty by the synthetic "structure."

Perhaps no better illustration of the truth of this last proposition could be found than the one which is afforded by the English use of "shall " and "will" for the expression of the future tense.

The reader will find that the languages of the Teutonic stock were all deficient in the means of expressing futurity, and I shall hereafter endeavour to trace in a superficial manner the various devices for supplying this defect to which they had recourse. It will be shown too that in the disruption of the Latin and the reconstruction of the Romance tongues a similar want was created, and remedied by an auxiliary verb. In the latter family of languages, however, the principle inherent in the parent tongue has for the most part prevailed, and has caused this auxiliary to become, in fact, an inflection of the verb. No such process of construction was carried on in the Teutonic dialects. So far as English is concerned, we remain with two auxiliaries applicable to the expression of the future; both were originally employed for the same purpose in other languages of the same stock, but their use has been worked out among us, until it has attained a degree of nicety remarkable in itself and most difficult of acquirement by foreigners. Indeed, the majority of those whose native language is English—the Scotch, the Irish, and our American brethren, whether in the colonies or the United States, rarely adhere with strictness to the English idiom.

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3

It is not therefore surprising that the distinction between "shall" and will" should have been treated as capricious or unintelligible; it is easier to do this than to explain it thoroughly, but the difficulty of accounting for all the phenomena of language does not make their existence less real. Buttmann has truly said of many such matters, "The "idiom of language admits only of being observed; "let no man ask Why?" We cannot explain why one form should be current in Ireland and Scotland and another in England, any more than why the Athenians did not speak the same Greek as the Thebans. So long, however, as the literature and cultivated speech of England are the test of pure and grammatical English, the distinction between “shall” and "will" cannot be overlooked. I shall hereafter refer to the reviewers and grammarians, who, it has been truly said, "try to cover "their evasion of this difficulty by a little blustering."

It must be borne in mind that the question to be answered, with reference to the auxiliaries "shall” and "will," is not "which verb may we possibly

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use in speaking of a future act?" but "which "verb must we use when we intend to express futurity, and nothing more?" Now it is not always easy to isolate, as it were, this simple notion of futurity, and separate it from the shades of meaning, which, though not identical with it, may imply

3 "Man frage nicht warum-der Sprachgebrauch lässt sich nur beobachten."-Lexilogus, b. i. s. 239.

• Philological Museum, vol. ii. pp. 219, 220.

it or approximate to it. The auxiliaries now employed to express the future were originally selected for this purpose, because they conveyed the idea of a state of things or a condition such as probably implied futurity. It is not therefore singular that it should be sometimes difficult to strip off these shades of special signification, or to say which auxiliary may most properly be employed in a given case. A French future, such as "il viendra," may perhaps be best translated by "he will come," or by "he shall come;" the context alone, the dependence or independence of the sentence, or perhaps the tone of the speaker, must guide the translator in the selection of the proper auxiliary. In the abstract either may be right, but in an individual case they cannot therefore be used indifferently. It may often be that the English idiom will oblige the translation to be more definite than the original.

What is called "the future tense" of an English verb is commonly thus given :

Sing. 1. I shall die.

2. Thou wilt die.

3. He will die.

Plur. 1. We shall die.

2. You will die.

3. They will die.

That is to say, an auxiliary is employed to express the future for the first person, different from the auxiliary used to express the future for the second and third persons. Both these auxiliaries are words which have been used for this purpose in other languages, but the peculiarity in modern English is

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their systematic and regular appropriation to different persons. Professor de Morgan remarks, "In introducing the common mode of stating the "future tenses, Grammar has proceeded as if she were more than a formal science. She has no more "business to collect together I shall,' 'thou wilt,' he will,' than to do the same with 'I rule,' "thou art ruled,' he is ruled.'” Such a future tense offers, no doubt, what Dr. Latham calls "a logical, not an etymological sequence;" but if it be the business of Grammar to inform us how a verb is conjugated, it is surely her business to tell us how the future tense is expressed in all its persons. If there be no simple form which expresses time, or other modifications of sense by mere inflection, it appears to be "the business" of grammar to tell us by what contrivance the want is supplied. The question cannot be passed over in silence because a different auxiliary supplies the place of an altered form in the first person and the second. Grammar is, no doubt, a formal science, but part of its subject matter is the adaptation of form to meaning; the question now before us is the employment of verbs etymologically distinct as if they were mere grammatical forms, and with this, it appears to me, grammar, as the reflex of practice, is necessarily concerned.

5 Transactions of Philolog. Society. It seems to me that on the same principle no French Grammar had "any business to collect together" the present of the verb substantive and its imperfect "étais," derived, as this latter is, from a different root.

6 English Language, p. 238.