French professor investigated for awarding himself fake prize

French professor investigated for awarding himself fake prize5 hours agoShareSaveAdd as preferred on GoogleHugh SchofieldParisinsop.orgThe professor's award was proudly exhibited on the website of a non-existent International Society of PhilologyA French academic is under investigation for inventing a Nobel-style prize for philology in order that he could then go on to win it.Florent Montaclair, from Besançon in eastern France, was decorated with the Gold Medal of Philology in 2016 at a ceremony held at the National Assembly in Paris, attended by ministers and Nobel laureates.But the prize was a fiction, as was the body that supposedly awarded it, the International Society of Philology - both apparently dreamed up by Montaclair to burnish his academic credentials. Philology is the study of language through texts.Investigators in Besançon are now looking into the affair to see if any laws were broken, while the university where Montaclair taught for 20 years has suspended him indefinitely."It's such an unlikely tale, it could be out of a film," said Paul-Edouard Lallois, the prosecutor in charge of the enquiry.According to Lallois, Montaclair began his invention in 2015, around the time a Besançon newspaper carried a story headlined: "Local man on shortlist for Nobel."The report said that Montaclair was down to the last five for the prestigious international award. In December, he was reported to have won it, and in June the following year the awards ceremony took place in Paris.Then later that year the story reached a new level when Montaclair welcomed the celebrated US philosopher and linguist Noam Chomsky, then aged 88, at a ceremony in Brussels and awarded him an honorary gold medal from the International Society.Video of the ceremony can be seen online, as can the website of the society, which gives a list of laureates going back to 1967, including the Italian writer Umberto Eco. The amateurishness of the website should perhaps have...