The "when" was the 18th century: French as the language of Enlightenment.
Notwithstanding the radical role it would eventually play in the French and American Revolutions, the language of Enlightenment liberalism and universalism paradoxically evinced the finest qualities of the French nobility: cleverness, leisure, cultivation and charm.
But these fights were bordered, rhetorically and intellectually, by the Protestant-Enlightenment language that has characterized the country since the beginning.
He himself phrases it beautifully: "Fiction… is a kind of religious meditation in which language is the final enlightenment".
In taking Refuge in the Buddha, we take refuge in the possibility of freedom from greed, liberation from hatred and awakening from delusion -- this is one of the ways that "Enlightenment" is languaged.
P. Cornelius, in a study of invented languages in imaginary travel accounts from the 17th and 18th centuries, proposes that a perfect, rationally organised language is indicative of the Enlightenment's rationalism.
Heliade's most influential contributions are related to his interest in developing the modern Romanian language, in which he synthesized Enlightenment tenets and Romantic nationalist ideals of the 1848 generation.
Although known mainly as the author of the epic Der Messias, Friedrich Gottlieb Klopstock was in fact the major poet of the German Enlightenment, liberating lyric poetry from the standing rules and stressing innovative language, images, and metres.
The acquisition of knowledge is, as Sunstein points out, a social process: it is shaped by language, by custom, and, since the Enlightenment, by certain widely accepted standards of evidence and rationality.
Prior to the Enlightenment, scholars imagined that words and languages had been created as they were, via divine agency (van Wyhe 2005: 94).
