Jean-Pierre Brisset
Brisset, Jean-Pierre (1837-1923). An erudite yet eccentric philologist whose biography remains obscure, Brisset came to light in the 1980s when French linguistics began to address various marginal cases. Brisset's grand aim was to reveal the origins not only of language but of Creation itself. Words, he contends, originate in God-the-Logos; they are always linked to things; hence all aspects of language open onto cosmology. Publications such as La Grammaire logique (1883) and La Science de Dieu (1900), which he financed himself, are replete with delirious puns and sound-permutations, yet have an unremitting seriousness. One of his more provocative ideas is that Man is descended from the frog, a claim based on phonetic evidence and confirmed, Brisset triumphantly notes, in the empirical fact that human sperm resembles tadpoles.
— Roger Cardinal
