That was the language of the ruling class for several centuries.
Rambling alternative history lessons pull you up sharp before the fact, say, that for 339 years (between 1066 and 1399) the language of the ruling class in England was French.
The Norman Conquest and a period in which French was the language of the ruling class in England effected great changes on English and contributed a very substantial number of French words to English vocabulary hence the quantity of near synonymous pairs available today: begin, commence; end, finish; kingly, royal; fight, combat; and so on.
But to have thoughts with propositional structure requires a sophisticated capacity with powers akin to those of linguistic processing, which returns us to the problem of tying consciousness too tightly to something like language, and so ruling out animal consciousness at the start of the enquiry.
It's because of the historical convergence of race and class in America that we conflate the language of the educated, ruling classes with the language of a particular racial identity.
Indeed, in its tone and language, the ruling seemed to suggest that it had probably been a while since the circuit judges last watched "Animal House".
Should a nation be defined by language and territory, by ruling party or by faith, asks Roger Scruton.
Instead, the judge adopted the language proposed by the S.E.C., ruling that defendants could be found to be primary participants in a fraud if they acted with the intent to deceive, even if the idea for a misrepresentation came from someone else.
A federal appeals court disagreed in 2014, ruling that computer language that connects programs - known as application programming interfaces, or APIs - can be copyrighted.
Fortunately, England was conquered by the French in 1066, and the long period of French-language hegemony in the English ruling class left us Americans with a healthy conceptual distinction between debt and guilt that still usually places us on Paris's side of the monetary-policy divide in Europe.
