The large volume of literature on foreign elements in English has not been matched so far by enquiries on a comparable scale into the history of English words abroad. The disproportion is indeed so great that it is apt to give an erroneous idea of the balance sheet of linguistic debit and credit. Studies of lexicological expansion are still in their infancy; and in this particular case, the chronology and character of the process may have acted as a deterrent. England's prestige and influence began to make themselves felt at the very end of the seventeenth century and quickly reached a climax in the eighteenth. By that time, however, all Western languages had developed too far, and their speakers had become too language conscious, for the newcomer to make any lasting and decisive impression. Most Anglicisms would seem at first sight superficial, easy to detect, and without any serious problems for the student of diachronistic linguistics. Nevertheless, a synthesis is urgently required, for the late inception of the process does not lessen in any way its paramount significance in the political and cultural history of Europe, and the most tangible and accurate method devised so far for a structural analysis of such influences consists in careful scrutiny of their linguistic deposit. The general framework of such a comprehensive survey has been outlined by L. P. Smith,1 while a good deal of valuable spadework has been accomplished in French and German, and to some extent in Dutch and Italian.2 To undertake a synthesis would be therefore distinctly premature; but in French at least, sufficient data are available to attempt a piecing together of the picture.

The most important study of the future with shall and will in Modern English is the article by Professor Fries published twenty years ago. In Part One, “The origin and development of the conventional rules,” Professor Fries presents a remarkably concise and thorough survey of the treatment of shall and will by English grammarians from 1530 to the early nineteenth century. In Part Two he summarizes the results of an analysis of the use of shall and will in English plays from 1557 to 1915, compares American with English usage, considers the theory of ‘glimmering through’ of ‘primitive meanings,‘ and states his conclusions. Professor Fries reverts to the subject in his recent book, American English Grammar. Here he says:

The conventional rules for shall and will did not arise from any attempt to describe the practice of the language as it actually was either before the eighteenth century or at the time the grammar was written in which these rules first appeared. The authors of these grammars (Lowth and Ward) definitely repudiated usage…. That the general usage of shall and will did not at any time during the history of Modern English agree with the conventional rules is a conclusion that can be reasonably drawn from the facts revealed in the following charts.