<p>I consider myself a good grammarian but this has been bothering me…</p>
<p>Is Cornell’s motto grammatically correct? </p>
<p>“I would found an institution where any person can find instruction in any study.”</p>
<p>Are you referring to the peculiar use of the word “would”? If so, it’s atypical, but nonetheless grammatically correct.</p>
<p>the combination of the words “would” and “found” just bothers me.</p>
<p>“Found” means “establish” here.</p>
<p>that would make sense. thanks</p>
<p>I believe it’s grammatically correct, but it just sounds really awkward. I’m guessing that was written a long time ago when Cornell was founded. That would explain why it sounds so weird.</p>
<p>reminds me of this quote:
“‘I would found an institution where any person can find instruction in any study’ – now I know why they usually put this **** in Latin.” --Jon Stewart</p>
<p>I had thought that it sounded funny too, but the modal use there seems normal given the time period in which it was written.</p>
<p>I’m more concerned about its egotistical nature.</p>
<p>I think it would sound better and more modern if “would” was replaced with “will”</p>
<p>When the verb “to be” is used in the first person future indicative, the correct form is actually “shall.”</p>
<p>A Cornell outreach person called me and said that motto to me in the beginning, and it really bothered me a lot, too. So much so that I think I temporarily forgot it’s an ivy and kind of disregarded the call. :P</p>
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<p>Just throwing this out there, but “shall” is not a form of “to be.” “Shall,” in addition to “will,” is a modal. English does not actually have a future tense in the morphological sense (it obviously does in the semantic sense), in that it doesn’t have a conjugated form to express the future. Instead, we use modals like “shall” and “will” (even present-participle construction going to).</p>
<p>Unless you’re being facetious, in which case you can ignore this linguistic banter. :)</p>