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This is the origin of the future tense in Western Romance languages such as French and Italian (see below). A given language may have more than one way to express futurity. English, for example, often refers to future events using present tense forms or other structures such as the going-to future, besides the canonical form with will/shall.
Outside DoD, other parts of the U.S. government advise against using the word shall for three reasons: it lacks a single clear meaning, it causes litigation, and it is nearly absent from ordinary speech. The legal reference Words and Phrases dedicates 76 pages to summarizing hundreds of lawsuits that centered around the meaning of the word shall.
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Generally, words coming from French often retain a higher register than words of Old English origin, and they are considered by some to be more posh, elaborate, sophisticated, or pretentious. However, there are exceptions: weep , groom and stone (from Old English) occupy a slightly higher register than cry , brush and rock (from French).
The English modal auxiliary verbs are a subset of the English auxiliary verbs used mostly to express modality, properties such as possibility and obligation. [a] They can most easily be distinguished from other verbs by their defectiveness (they do not have participles or plain forms [b]) and by their lack of the ending ‑(e)s for the third-person singular.
"They shall not pass" (French: Ils ne passeront pas and French: On ne passe pas; Romanian: Pe aici nu se trece; Spanish: No pasarán) is a slogan, notably used by France in World War I, to express a determination to defend a position against an enemy.
The saying is always in an English-speaking context, and was evidently a word-for-word mistranslation of English "What will be will be", using the free relative pronoun what. [8] In Spanish, Italian, French, or Portuguese, "what" must be translated as "that which" (lo que, quel che, ce qui, o que). [16]
As for shall vs should, my (northwestern US) ears prefer shall but the difference is very slight. Shall focuses on your magnimony, and you may already be half-standing when you say it. Should focuses on your social obligation, and you may have no intention of opening the window unless the other person says "yes". --Sluggoster 09:28, 5 November ...