Grammaire et vocabulaire de la langue taensa avec textes traduits et commentés par J.-D. Haumonté, Parisot, L. Adam

4to. pp. [4], xix, 111, f. 1. Original wrappers.

Pretended French translation of an anonymous Spanish manuscript describing a native American language, Taensa, alleged by Jean Parisot (1861–1923, a.k.a. Dom Marie-Jean Parisot, OSB), a young seminarian of Plombières (Vosges) to have been found in the library of 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 the present work. 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 – on marriage, war, death, housebuilding, a river brimming with fish, a sick wife, ‘Le Chant de l’Étranger’, a flower closing its petals, and a hummingbird. 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 (see Bib# 4102993-5/Fr# 1358-60 for two printed letters of defence by Adam, and another he procured from the German linguist Friedrich Müller–who recalls Psalmanazar, but rejects the connection – all dated 1885). Brinton, however, emerged unchallenged by anyone save Gatschet, and his essay ‘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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