Sir: In his article on the decline of the French language and the rise of English (June 2017) Christie Davies omitted some important turning points. One of these was the loss of Canada. When Captain Cook was charting the Saint Lawrence River the British and the French were preparing to fight each other, and they left him alone because his charts would be invaluable to whichever side won Canada. Could it have been Cook who whispered to General Wolfe, the British commander, that there was a track on the steep river bank that would lead him up to confront the…