User:Marcel deBelzier Jr.

Marcel deBelzier (1805 – 1872) French mystic whose main interest was in solving the mystery of the Tower of Babel using linguistic methods. Central to his writings is a belief that language has remained in a state of confusion since the time of Genesis and that its repair would herald a new quality of life within an organizational setting.

In the early 1820’s deBelzier studied Moral Theology for a short time at the Sorbonne but decided to switch to languages following conflicts with the teaching staff whom he found to be too dogmatic.

His best known work is Mingling of the Waters, a manuscript discovered in a Paris nightclub around 1855, in which he claims that all present-day languages suffer from a confused verb formation. Scholars generally agree that deBelzier was influenced by an eleventh-century manuscript written by Gregory of Ilford about whom little is known other than the circumstances of his death: Gregory was burned as a heretic.

deBelzier’s beliefs guided his life’s mission – to research and demonstrate verb-confusion in all the major languages and so start a process of repairing the world.

Thus started the twelve-year period 1856 – 1868, during which time deBelzier produced his gigantic Encyclopaedias of Logical Forms of which there are several known editions: French (1858), English (1861), Russian (1863), Spanish (1864) and Finnish (1868). Given the massive intellectual gift that Marcel deBelzier was willing to munificently bestow on mankind it remains a mystery that despite his most strenuous efforts he remained unable to find a publisher for his Encyclopedias, each of which it is estimated would have required a total of six thousand and forty-one pages of closely-spaced tiny type, each line illuminating one of his logical conjugations, this exhaustive and definitive reference work harvesting for the reader’s benefit all the verbs of an entire language displayed for every conceivable person and tense, all this within a single, almost transportable, book.

He died at the Hospice for the Criminally Insane outside Paris in 1872.

Note 1: At least one early 20th century (out of copyright) edition of Encyclopaedia Britannica is believed to have mentioned delBelizer in several footnotes and bibliographies. Unfortunately these cannot currently be traced as exact references.