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I recently came across an interview with Noam Chomsky in which he made an intriguing claim. He mentioned that the grammatical rule distinguishing the use of "shall" for the first person and "will" for all other persons when expressing the future tense was invented by a specific 17th-century grammarian, whose name he could not recall. Chomsky used this example to illustrate how some linguistic rules are entirely artificial constructs, imposed by individuals rather than naturally evolving within the language.

While researching, I discovered that John Wallis might have been the grammarian who codified this rule in his works. This prescriptive rule has intrigued me, particularly because I recall the difficulty of learning and correctly applying it during my early school years when that topic was at hand.

However, I have been unable to find additional sources confirming that this rule was indeed the creation of a single individual and subsequently popularized despite its lack of natural use among English speakers. While Chomsky is undoubtedly a seminal figure in linguistics, I find it essential to critically evaluate his assertions, especially because many of them are controversial among the broader linguistic community.

Could anyone provide more insight into this matter? Was the distinction between "shall" and "will" purely an artificial imposition by one grammarian, later entrenched in educational curricula despite its practical obsolescence? Alternatively, did this concept have natural usage origins before becoming codified and later falling out of common use?

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    I would note that in current English, the ‘rule’ (to the extent that it is a rule) is not obsolescent. Shall is overall much, much rarer than will almost everywhere, but it remains far more common in the first person than in the second or third persons; and it is often used for simple future tense in the first person, but mostly for deontic futures (expression obligation) elsewhere. For example, “I shall do the dishes” is an offer or statement of fact; “You shall do the dishes” is an order. And in questions, “Shall we go?” is normal, while “?Shall you go?” is borderline ungrammatical.
    – Janus Bahs Jacquet
    Commented Jul 24 at 19:04
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    I think that, like a number of other "rules" that we owe to the eighteenth century grammarians, it was not invented out of whole cloth, but was originally an attempt to bring order to what they observed. I think there was a tendency to use shall and (non-obligatory) should in the first person, and whichever writer it was noticed this and either elevated it to a rule, or suggested it might be a rule.
    – Colin Fine
    Commented Jul 25 at 21:29
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    Also note that other Germanic languages show the same first vs second person distinction (though less so in the third person) with their cognate equivalents to shall and will; e.g., Norwegian “Jeg skal ta oppvasken” (I’ll do the dishes, volunteering) vs “Du skal ta oppvasken” (you’ve got to do the dishes, ordering). This supports @Colin’s point that the distinction wasn’t just made up, but is based on a real feature of not only English, but Germanic languages in general.
    – Janus Bahs Jacquet
    Commented Jul 26 at 21:15

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The rule, invented or not, makes a bit of sense IMHO when you look at the historical connotations of 'shall' and 'will'. These can still be somewhat perceived when you think of a phrase like "they shall eat bread" or "Shall they eat bread, then!". Here, 'shall' is less about the future (tense or real), it is more about what one ought do; it's quite close to "they should eat bread", it would be appropriate for them to do that.

Opposed to this is "they will eat bread". This is more of a factual statement about the future actions of "them", and it is derived from "it is their will to eat bread", it is (presumably) their plan to do that. "They shall eat bread" is a 'future as imposed from outside, by propriety', whereas in "they will eat bread" it is more of a future that comes about from the actors' own motivations. The latter, "they will", is the one that took over in frequency and lost the part where we think about "someone's will", it bleached to the point where (almost) only grammatical tense pure and simple is left.

As for "I shall" as in "Shall I open the window?", I do not, out of modesty, like to impose my plans and wishes unto others. German mothers admonish their kids when the say (quite naturally) "ich will mehr haben", cuz that's no way to talk, as a kid, at the table, that should be "ich möchte gerne mehr" or even better "kann ich bitte mehr haben?". So "Shall I open the window?" is requesting affirmation from others that it is appropriate for me to open the window. "Shall you open the window?" sounds strange plain and simple, like "Should you open the window?", to which the answer can only be a blank stare and the retort, "Well, what do you think, should I open it? I don't know!".

Now, while "Will you open the window?" is at least rather rare, "Would you (please) open the window?" is a perfectly polite everyday sentence.

With the above considerations in mind, I feel it rather unlikely that the motivation to relegate 'shall' to the 1st and 'will' to the other grammatical persons is the work of a single author who pushed arbitrary personal preferences to their readers; I guess it's more like a simplification—maybe an oversimplification—of existing actual usage, a handy dandy memorable rule-of-thumb to cut through the slight mess that is the future tense in English with its 'will' and 'shall' and that other one, 'going to'. "Next year I shall visit Rome in summer, and ere winter return" sounds more, y'know, modest, because these are not my plans God forbid, it's just appropriate. What are your plans though, "Will you be there, too"?

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Shall and will stem from two completely different roots, so if you go back far enough, there was a difference that was real, not artificial.

There are probably better examples of grammar rules imposed from the top down, like the rule to not split infinitives.

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    I am aware that the to words are not etymologically related. However my question was in regard to the explicit imposition of using "shall" for the first person and "will" for all other persons when expressing the future tense.
    – bananaking69
    Commented Jul 24 at 19:57

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