A History of English Language

A history of the english language 264
common but not universal tendency in the written language, evident in the letter-writers
of the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. 36 That the distinction was not observed
in colloquial speech may be inferred from the language of plays, and today it is
commonly ignored except by speakers who conform consciously to the rules or inherit a
tradition which has been influenced by rules.
201. Methods of Approach.
The considerations by which these questions were settled were three in number: reason,
etymology, and the example of Latin and Greek.
Dryden had asserted that “the foundation of the rules is reason.” But reason covered a
multitude of sins. Johnson argued from it when he condemned the grammar is now
printing, 37 because the active participle was “vulgarly used in a passive sense.” By
similar logic Lowth objected to I am mistaken, since it should properly mean I am
misunderstood and not I am wrong. But reason was commonly taken to mean consistency
or, as it was called, analogy. Analogy appeals to an instinct very common at all times in
matters of language, the instinct for regularity. Even Priestley was influenced by it. “The
chief thing to be attended to in the improvement of a language,” he says, “is the analogy
of it. The more consistent are its principles, the more it is of a piece with itself, the more
commodious it will be for use.” Consequently, where one expression could be paralleled
by another in the language it was commonly preferred for that reason. Campbell erects
this into one of his general “canons.” He says: “If by the former canon the adverbs
backwards and for-
35 See Charles C.Fries, “The Periphrastic Future with shall and will in Modern English,” PMLA, 40
(1925), 963–1024.
36
For evidence drawn from letters of a preference for shall in the first person in simple future
statements, see J.R.Hulbert, “On the Origin of the Grammarians’ Rules for the Use of shall and
will,” PMLA, 62 (1947), 1178–82. For evidence that the grammarians’ rules for direct statements,
indirect statements, and questions had a basis in usage, see J.Taglicht, “The Genesis of the
Conventional Rules of Shall and Will,” English Studies, 51 (1970), 193–213.
37
On this construction see § 210.