4. The Aztec terms for their lineal standard being apparently of Maya origin, suggest that their standard was derived from that nation.
5. Neither of the three nations was acquainted with a system of estimation by weight, nor with the use of the plumb-line, nor with an accurate measure of long distances.
THE CURIOUS HOAX OF THE TAENSA LANGUAGE.
One might think it a difficult task to manufacture a new language “from the whole cloth;” but, in fact, it is no great labor. We have but to remember that within the last dozen years more than a dozen “world-languages” have been framed and offered for acceptance, and we at once perceive that a moderate knowledge of tongues and some linguistic ingenuity are all that is required.
It is an innocent amusement so long as no fraudulent use is made of the manufactured product; but the temptation to play a practical joke, and to palm off a deception on overeager linguists, is as great in languages as it is in archæology—and every antiquary knows how suspiciously he has to scrutinize each new specimen.
A curious hoax, which deceived some of the best linguists of Europe and America, was perpetrated about a decade ago by two young French seminarists, Jean Parisot and A. Dejouy. Interested by reading Châteaubriand, and by various publications on American languages which appeared in France about that time, they made up a short grammar and a list of words of what they called the Tansa language, from a name they found in Châteaubriand’s Voyage en Amerique, and into this invented tongue they translated the Lord’s Prayer, the Creed, an Algonkin hymn published in Paris, and other material.
At first, the two students pursued this occupation merely as an amusement, but it soon occurred to them that more could be made of it; so M. Parisot sent a batch of the alleged “fragments” of the “Tansa” to the publishers, Maisonneuve et Cie, Paris, for publication. The manuscripts were passed over to M. Julien Vinson, editor of the Révue de Linguistique, who addressed the young author for further particulars. M. Parisot replied that these pieces were copies of originals obtained many years before by his grandfather, from what source he knew not, and on the strength of this vague statement, they duly appeared in the Révue.
Their publication attracted the attention of the eminent French linguist, M. Lucien Adam, who had long occupied himself with American tongues, and he entered into correspondence with M. Parisot. The latter’s stock meanwhile had considerably increased. He and his friend had published at Epinal, apparently privately, a small pamphlet, with an introductory note in bad Spanish, containing a number of “songs” in the “Taensa,” as they now called their language. They claimed in the note that the songs had been obtained by a traveler in America, in the year 1827 or 1828, “in the Taensa town, on the banks of the Mississippi or the Alabama”(!)[[415]]
With this abundant material at hand, young Parisot replied cheerfully to M. Adam, and supplied that scientist with “copy” from the alleged ancestral MSS. quite enough to fill a goodly volume of grammar, songs, lexicon, and the various paraphernalia of a linguistic apparatus, all of which eager M. Adam and his collaborator, Mr. A. S. Gatschet, the expert linguist attached to our Bureau of Ethnology, received in good faith and without a suspicion of the joker who victimized them; and what is more singular, without having a doubt excited by the many and gross blunders of the young seminarist.
Their joint work reached the United States in 1883, and for two years was received both here and in Europe as a genuine production. My attention was first attracted to it in 1883, and then I referred to it as a “strange” production; but I did not give it a close examination until the close of 1884. This examination led me to prepare the following article, which was published in the American Antiquarian for March, 1885: