Downvoted for reading in distinctions that aren't there. What Fowler may have thought is irrelevant, what matters is what was actually meant and how the words are actually used. "Will" and "shall" are interchangeable in almost all dialects of English, and in the few in which they aren't, the exact distinction is complicated.
What Fowler may have thought is irrelevant, what matters is what was actually meant and how the words are actually used.
The change since Fowler has been to use ‘will’ in place of ‘shall’, not the other way around. I have read more than Fowler on ‘will’ vs ‘shall’, but I've never read anything to suggest that any dialect uses ‘shall’ with the third person in a declarative statement to mean the simple future.
This is all only a minor point, since Harry didn't say ‘shall’ and it's clear what wedifrid meant. But I hope that it gets downvoted for unimportan...
Update: This post has also been superseded - new comments belong in the latest thread.
The second thread has now also exceeded 500 comments, so after 42 chapters of MoR it's time for a new thread.
From the first thread: