[1] A clerical student named Jean Parisot published purported "material of the Taensa language, including papers, songs, a grammar and vocabulary" in Paris in 1880-1882, reports which led to considerable interest on the part of philologists and linguists of the time.

Several eminent scholars accepted the materials as genuine, but by 1885, Daniel Garrison Brinton and Julien Vinson had begun arguing that the work was fraudulent.

[6] In the 1880s, Jean Parisot, a nineteen-year-old student at a seminary in Plombières, France,[7] published a grammar and other material of what he claimed to be the hitherto undocumented language of the Taensa people of Louisiana.

Lucien Adam, an older linguist who had worked on North American languages, encouraged Parisot to publish the full material and contributed commentaries to the resulting book.

The Grammaire et vocabulaire de la langue Taensa, avec textes traduits et commentés par J.-D. Haumonté, Parisot, L. Adam was published in 1882 in Paris and caused a stir among linguists.

[11] In 1908 and 1910, John R. Swanton concluded it was a hoax, based on primarily historical rather than linguistic grounds,[7] presenting evidence that the Taensa people spoke either the Natchez language or a close variant of it.

[8] Franz Boas's Introduction to the Handbook of American Indian Languages concluded there were enough "internal evidences of the fraudulent character" of the material that "it will be far safer to reject both the vocabulary and grammar".