 Judgments are also called propositions, so propositions are mental entities. The priority of thought to language thus includes the point that linguistic expressions of mental propositions are propositions in a derivative, verbal sense. Verbal propositions are usually simply called “propositions” and the reader is expected to sort this out by context. Additionally supposing that the reader will not forget the distinction between thought and language, the authors use the terms “subject” and “predicate” to refer both to the ideas making up a judgment and to the linguistic expressions of the subject and predicate ideas. Because every simple judgment is composed of a subject idea and a predicate idea that are related by an act of affirmation or denial, the subject and predicate ideas are expressed linguistically in the simplest case by a proper or substantive noun and a common noun or adjective. The affirmation is expressed by a verb; expressions of denial add a negative word (II.3, 82–3). Arnauld and Nicole criticize Aristotle and other philosophers who combine the copula with features of the predicate (time) and subject (person); in a language mirroring Cartesian thought, there would be only one substantive verb, namely to be. In fact, natural languages often combine the predicate with the verb, as in “Peter lives”, and Latin verbs sometimes express all three elements of judgment in one word, as in cogito and sum. Such verbs as “lives” can always be expressed with verb phrases including “is” and a noun phrase. The proposition “Peter lives” for example, can be linguistically rendered as “Peter is living.”