"From the day of its foundation, in 1866, the Societé Linguistique de Paris let it be known that it wouldn't accept papers claiming to explain how human language had originated. The savants felt they had a right to be spared the at best ignorant and at worst lunatic theorizing of those who believed they had an answer to this seductively remote question.

Historical linguistics had become a subject reserved for those who dealt in facts, and the extra-historical matter of language's origins could be left aside, exciting for sure when addressed by a Rousseau or a Herder, futile when addressed by madmen or amateurs led on by the new fashion for thinking in evolutionary terms. The situation wasn't promising therefore for the man whose theorizing was, it's safe to say, the most lunatic of all, so strange indeed as to have been cherished now for more than a century, whether as an example of what André Breton called the "humour of reception", which is when we laugh at something that wasn't intended to be funny, or as a crucial resource in the study of linguistic misapprehension. This was Jean-Pierre Brisset..."