Jean-Pierre Brisset & logophilia

Brisset no doubt returned to Port Royal and to the General Grammar before Saussure. In fact, the title of his principal linguistic work acknowledges the debt: The Logical Grammar. It is as if Brisset had successfully blended Grammar and Logic in order to finally create that portmanteau science which others before him had dreamed of, beginning with Leibniz and his project of a universal characteristic. Yet, in the first phase of his research, he restricts himself to monoglossia, and at no point becomes involved in inventing his own Esperanto. Like all the other logophiles, Brisset will only be able to find universality in what already exists. In spite of his ‘logical’ requirement, his work remains essentially founded upon an insurmountable empiricism, and attached to a research which remains flush with a chaos of the language that he is only concerned with ordering.

SOURCE: Pierssens, Michel. The Power of Babel: A Study of Logophilia, translated by Carl R. Lovitt (London; Boston; Henley: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1980), p. 65.