ABSTRACT
The production of a (Taiwanese) language The Taiwanese language was once nothing but the product of a swindler. At the beginning of the eighteenth century, George Psalmanazar appeared in Europe’s academic circles, pretending to be a native of the island of Formosa. His performance was successful to the degree that respected scholars were taken in. The success of Psalmanazar’s pretended Formosan identity was to a large extent due to the fact that he was able to demonstrate a fluent command of the Formosan language, which he claimed was closely related to Japanese. To top it off, he also presented a native Formosan alphabet. The shapes of the letters – resembling hooks, circles, and squares – have nothing in common with those of the Roman alphabet. It was claimed that this Formosan alphabet was a native script of Taiwan’s aborigines. In his famous Description of Formosa (1704) he countered doubts about the authenticity of the Formosan language and script by asking, ‘Why should I be such a Fool to invent an Alphabet, and a Language, purposely to lessen my own credit?’ (quoted by Keevak 2004: 62; see also Foley 1992). Interestingly, although it was soon widely known that Psalmanazar had indeed made up both the language and the script, the myth of a native Formosan alphabet survived its creator by many decades. Among the victims of the hoax we find no one less than the linguist and Sinologist Albert Terrien de Lacouperie (1845-94, cf. Klöter forthcoming).
