"The linguist J. Fraser (1926),for example, presented a well-known (but faulty) caricature of the whole enterprise by re-constructing a proto-Romance scenario from the paleolinguistic evidence of the historic Romance languages: "By th[is] same method of investigation we shall discover that the Romans had emperors, and a republic; that they had priests, called by a name represented by die French pretre, and bishops; that they drank beer, probably, but certainly coffee, and that they smoked tobacco" (269)."