4to. pp. 22.

Bound with two other pamphlets (see Bib# 4102994-5/Fr# 1359-60 in this collection) on the same subject, an imaginary language hoax by a seminarian, Jean Parisot (1861–1923, a.k.a. Dom Marie-Jean Parisot, OSB), who claimed to have inherited a manuscript account of a native American language from his grandfather, Jean Dominique Haumonté. Parisot’s preliminary article in the Revue de linguistique et de philologie comparée caught the eye of the distinguished philologist Lucien Adam, who accepted it without question, and supplied a prefatory endorsement to Parisot’s Grammaire et vocabulaire de la langue Taensa, avec textes traduits et commentés (1882, see Bib# 4102992/Fr# 1357). The ‘textes’, in which Parisot put his imaginary language to good literary use, are eleven prose-poems or songs–seven of which, without translation, he had published the year before in a booklet titled Cancionero Americano. The far better qualified Americanist Daniel Brinton, sceptical from the start, remarked on the ‘Ossianic’ quality of these. Reception was mixed, but Adam and the American philologist A. S. Gatschet (who had contributed to the original Grammaire et vocabulaire) continued to uphold the authenticity of the extracts against Brinton’s trenchant attack. The current work is a letter of printed defence by Adam and is bound with another one of his hand (see Bib# 4102994/Fr# 1359), and another he procured from the German linguist Friedrich Müller–who recalls Psalmanazar, but rejects the connection (Bib# 4102995/Fr# 1360). Brinton, however, emerged unchallenged by anyone save Gatschet, and his ‘The Curious Hoax of the Taensa Language’ (see Bib# 4102996/Fr# 1361), reinforced by John R. Swanton in ‘The Language of the Taënsa’ (American Anthropologist, 1908), remains the definitive refutation.

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