Shall and Will - History

History

Germanic did not inherit any Proto-Indo-European forms to express the future tense, but innovated by forming it with auxiliary verbs. This was the case in Gothic and the earliest recorded expressions of Germanic languages.

Both shall and will are verbs of ancient Germanic ancestry. The verb shall represents Old English sceal, and is cognate with Old Norse skal, German soll, and Dutch zal; these all represent *skol-, the o-grade of Indo-European *skel-. All of these verbs function as auxiliaries in each language, and represent either simple futurity or necessity.

The verb will is cognate with the noun will, and continues Old English willan, which represents *willjan. It occurs in Old Norse vilja, German wollen, Dutch willen, Gothic wiljan; it has many relatives outside of Germanic as well, including, for example, Latin velle "to wish for" or Polish (West Slavic) "ja wolę" - I would rather / prefer ("ę" is for a nasal open "e"); the root also occurs in voluptas, "pleasure". All of these forms derive from the e-grade or o-grade of Indo-European *wel-, meaning to wish for or to desire.

In addition to shall and will, other verbs were used as future auxiliaries in Old English, including mun, directly related to Old Norse munu and a defective verb that is the immediate source of Scots maun, and related to Modern English must.

Both verbs are preterite-present verbs in Old English, as they were generally in Germanic. This means that in their conjugation, they were conjugated in the preterite with present meaning. They show this status by the fact that they are conjugated in the third person as she shall (as opposed to *she shalls.) Will can be conjugated in both ways (she will, she wills) with a difference in meaning and construction; the simple present form is not used as an auxiliary verb and does not govern the infinitive. The forms should and would were derived from the dental suffix of the weak verbs.

Old English did not have a future tense, but because the verbs shall and will hint at one, they became modal verbs used for this purpose. In the simple future usage, the different meanings of shall and will depending on which grammatical person is being used is an example of suppletion, the commingling of words from separate roots into a single paradigm.

According to Merriam Webster's Dictionary of English Usage, the distinction in meaning between shall and will as markers of a simple future arose from the practice of English schools in the fourteenth century and their Latin exercises. It was the custom in these schools to use will to translate Latin velle; because shall had no exact equivalent in Latin, it was used to translate the Latin future tense. The usage of the schools kept shall alive in this role. John Wycliffe used it consistently in this manner in his Bible translation into Middle English. Will was already beginning to predominate as the marker for the simple future through all grammatical persons in English, and is the usual marker for a simple future in Chaucer.

The most influential proponent of the distinction was John Wallis, whose 1653 Grammatica Linguae Anglicanae stated "The rule is... to express a future event without emotional overtones, one should say I shall, we shall, but you/he/she/they will; conversely, for emphasis, willfulness, or insistence, one should say I/we will, but you/he/she/they shall".

Fowler wrote in his book The King's English, regarding the rules for using shall vs. will, the comment "the idiomatic use, while it comes by nature to southern Englishmen ... is so complicated that those who are not to the manner born can hardly acquire it". The Pocket Fowler's Modern English Usage, OUP, 2002, says of the rule for the use of shall and will: "it is unlikely that this rule has ever had any consistent basis of authority in actual usage, and many examples of English in print disregard it". Shall and will are now used as auxiliary verbs. However, they have their origins as main verbs and are still sometimes used in a way that reflects aspects of their original Old English senses, regardless of grammatical person. Thus shall is used with the meaning of obligation and will with the meaning of desire or intention.

A popular contrast between shall and will appeared in the 19th Century, in the 20th century, and continues to the present::

• A desperate cry for help: “I shall drown, no one will save me!”
• The intention to commit suicide: “I will drown, no one shall save me!”

Steven Pinker wrote he "was skeptical that any Englishman made that distinction in the past century. Winston Churchill seemed determined enough when he said 'We shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills; we shall never surrender.'"