THE TAENSA GRAMMAR AND DICTIONARY.
A Deception Exposed.
The student of American languages is under many obligations to the editors and publishers of the Bibliothéque Linguistique Américaine, nine volumes of which have been issued by the firm of Maisonneuve et Cie., Paris. Most of these contain valuable authentic original material, from approved sources, and edited with judgment. The exception to this rule is the volume last issued, which from its character deserves more than a passing criticism.
This volume bears the following title: Grammaire et Vocabulaire de la Langue Taensa, avec Textes Traduits et Commentés par J. D. Haumonté, Parisot, L. Adam. Pp. 19, III. It contains what professes to be a grammar of the Taensas Indians, who lived near the banks of the lower Mississippi, in the parish of that name in Louisiana, when it was first discovered, but who have long since become extinct. Following the grammar are the “Texts,” a remarkable series of native songs in the alleged Taensa tongue, with a French translation, accompanied by a commentary and a vocabulary.
All this array has been received by scholars without question. It looks so extremely scientific and satisfactory that no one has dared assail its authenticity. Moreover, the book appears with an historical introduction by Mr. Albert S. Gatschet, of our Bureau of Ethnology, and one of the editors is M. Lucien Adam, a gentleman who stands at the head of European Americanists. Mr. Gatschet, moreover, fully recognizes the authenticity of the whole in his latest work, and up to the present I know of no one who has doubted it, either in this country or in Europe.
It is, therefore, only after a great deal of consideration and hesitation that I now give publicity to the opinion I have long entertained, that a gross deception has been somewhere practiced in the preparation of this book, and that it is not at all what it purports to be. Let it be understood that I distinctly exculpate the gentlemen I have named from any share in this; they can only be charged with the venial error of allowing their enthusiasm for knowledge to get the better of their critical acumen.
I shall proceed to give with as much brevity as possible the reasons which have led me to reject the pretended character of this work.
And first I may note that both the history of the alleged original manuscript and the method in which it has been presented are to the last degree unsatisfactory. About the former, M. Haumonté tells us that among the papers of his grandfather, who died as mayor of Plombères, in 1872, he found a manuscript in Spanish, without date or name of author, and that it is this manuscript “translated and arranged,” which is the work before us. M. Adam adds that for his part he had revised this translation and advised the omission of certain passages not “profitable to science.” I have been informed by a private source that M. Adam was not shown the original Spanish manuscript, although he asked to see it. We are deprived therefore of any expert opinion as to the age of the manuscript, or its authorship.
We naturally ask, how did this manuscript come to be in Spanish? No one has been able to point out in the voluminous histories of the Spanish Missions a single reference to any among the Taensas. Moreover, this tribe was constantly under French observation from its first discovery by La Salle in 1682, until its entire destruction and disappearance about 1730–40, as is minutely recorded by Charlevoix, who even adds the name of the planter who obtained the concession of their lands. With the knowledge we have of the early Louisiana colony, it would have been next to impossible for a Spanish monk to have lived with them long enough to have acquired their language, and no mention to have been made of him in the French accounts. That a Spaniard, not a monk, should have attempted it, would have excited still more attention from national distrust.
This preliminary ground of skepticism is not removed by turning to the grammar itself. As M. Adam remarks, the language is one “of extreme simplicity,” such simplicity that it excites more than the feeling of astonishment. How much liberty M. Haumonté allowed himself in his translation he unfortunately does not inform us; but I suppose that he scarcely went so far as to offer original opinions on the pronunciation of a language which no man has heard spoken for more than a century. If he did not, then the writer of the original manuscript must have been a pretty good linguist for his day, since he explains the pronunciation of the Taensa by the French, the English, the German, and the Spanish!! (p. 4). I suppose the references on p. 11, to the Nahuatl, Kechua and Algonkin tongues are by the translator, though we are not so told; at any rate, they are by some one who has given a certain amount of study to American languages, and could get up one not wholly unlike them. There is, however, just enough unlikeness to all others in the so-called Taensa to make us accept it “with all reserves,” as the French say. That an American language should have a distinctively grammatical gender, that it should have a true relative pronoun, that its numeral system should be based on the nine units in the extraordinarily simple manner here proposed, that it should have three forms of the plural, that its verbs should present the singular simplicity of these,—these traits are indeed not impossible, but they are too unusual not to demand the best of evidence.