Talk:Taensa language

Parisot or not?
The infobox claims Parisot created Taensa as a fraud. The text suggests this may be the case, but also that Parisot may have been fooled by somone else's fraudulent material.--Nø (talk) 10:55, 27 August 2016 (UTC)

Edits of this date
My attention was called to this article, and I noted that it failed to capture the cultural and lexicographic reality that this title expression has two meanings—the language spoken by this historic people, to whom some modern day Americans declare their ties, and the fraud of significant linguistic and historic interest that was perpetrated, suggesting a non-Natchez language existed that could be assigned to the people.

I have tried to sensitively keep all prior content, but also to introduce, in as scholarly a manner possible, the second connotation of the title phrase, and so honour the original people, and those that continue to go by this name.

Please, regular editors, have a look. The work needs some further effort—some material was drawn from other wikipedia pages that were not fully sourced, but these sourcing gaps can be filled in.

The key linguistic question which needs rigourous attention is how to describe the actual language used by the Taensa. It is impossible to say it was identical to Natchez—the two peoples had separated in a period of critical change, and were on war-footing at times with one another (and languages evolve under such pressures). More critically, the sources do not uniformly say they are (Sturtevant does not, Mooney does not, etc.), But, frankly, no authoritative statements have been accessed. (All the sources address what was not being spoken, the hoax content, not looking at the language that was being spoken.)

To close I would say that I am wed, neither to the whole of the material now in the article, nor to its current organisation. I simply believed that both meanings needed to be covered by an article to which general readers and native Americans (not just scholars) would go, and so put forth the effort so the two meaning are clear.

Cheers. Le Prof. Leprof 7272 (talk) 23:03, 7 March 2017 (UTC)


 * I think your changes improved the article. I tried to clarify the two uses of the term even further in the first paragraph.
 * I also tried to tone down the frequent, extremely POV pronouncements throughout the article, like that Swanton "published definitive works in 1908 and 1910 that removed all doubt". This seems even more important now, given Claire Bowern's re-assessment in a talk that somebody linked to a YouTube video of. (Thanks, whover that was — I'd never noticed Bowern did anything like that.) Bowern's conclusion seems plausible: Yeah, there's still a good chance it's a hoax, but it isn't an open-and-shut case and there's also plenty of things that don't fit well in the hoax theory.
 * One thing Bowern pointed out in her talk is that the only source for there being "two" students involved in the hoax seems to be a passing remark in an article by Brinton that also blames "A. Dejouy". This claim seems to have been copy-and-pasted into every subsequent work written by a skeptic. Since Brinton was neither impartial nor an eyewitness and since he gives no other source for this information, I replaced all references to "two students" with references to just Parisot. If anyone finds more solid evidence for a second prankster, feel free to add him back in. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 2604:3D09:A984:A600:F400:A5EA:FB5F:F976 (talk) 01:53, 30 September 2023 (UTC)