Taensa language

Daniel Garrison Brinton, initially positive, later argued the grammar was a hoax.

In the 1880s, Jean Parisot, a nineteen-year-old student at a seminary in Plombières, France,[7] published a grammar and other material of what he claimed to be the hitherto undocumented language of the Taensa people of Louisiana.[8] He claimed the material was based on an undated and anonymous manuscript in Spanish that he had found in the library of his maternal grandfather (surnamed Haumonté). Parisot published a short notice on the language in La Revue de linguistique et philologie comparée in 1880. Lucien Adam, an older linguist who had worked on North American languages, encouraged Parisot to publish the full material and contributed commentaries to the resulting book. The Grammaire et vocabulaire de la langue Taensa, avec textes traduits et commentés par J.-D. Haumonté, Parisot, L. Adam was published in 1882 in Paris and caused a stir among linguists.[9]

The material included an outline of the grammar, vocabulary and fragments of text in the Taensa language.[7] When the material was published, two eminent French Americanists, Lucien Adam and Julien Vinson, supported the work.[7]

The linguist Albert Samuel Gatschet defended the work at first.[7] Gatschet stated that the language was unrelated to any other.[9] In 1885 he started studies in Indiana, and thereafter became silent on the subject. The ethnologist Daniel Garrison Brinton also had an initially positive reaction, quoting a complete song from the grammar in an 1883 work on native American literature and praising the songs as "Ossianic in style."[10] Later Brinton reversed his position and declared that the material was fake, publishing his reasons in 1885.[7] Vinson also came to believe it was a hoax. Adam continued to defend the work for a while, but in 1885 he and Brinton co-authored Le Taensa a-t-il été forgé de toutes pièces, which discussed whether the entire work was a forgery.[11] In 1908 and 1910, John R. Swanton concluded it was a hoax, based on primarily historical rather than linguistic grounds,[7] presenting evidence that the Taensa people spoke either the Natchez language or a close variant of it.[8] Franz Boas's Introduction to the Handbook of American Indian Languages concluded there were enough "internal evidences of the fraudulent character" of the material that "it will be far safer to reject both the vocabulary and grammar".[9]

The fraud could have been the work of the unknown individual who created the manuscript Parisot claimed to find, or it could have been the work of Parisot,[1] although Adam and Parisot jointly stated that the documents had not been Parisot's work when the scandal broke in 1885.[12] Parisot later spent time in Turkey and in 1898 and 1902 published further works on linguistics based on his experience there.[7]

In 2018, Yale linguistics professor Claire Bowern challenged Brinton and Swanton's conclusion, arguing that the available evidence does not conclusively point to a hoax.[13]