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Samuel Beckett once remarked that he switched to writing in French rather than English because he considered it impossible to express anything in English that was not ambiguous. Linguistic reform under the auspices of the Académie Française in 17th century France resulted in a literary language stripped of foreign borrowings and regional accretions, and about which a century later Rivarol famously claimed that “If it isn’t clear, it isn’t French”.[1] English, by contrast, has always been accumulative, happily borrowing from everywhere, unruffled by neologisms, grammatical innovations and ambivalence.
