Volapük

Commemorative inscription for J. M. Schleyer on the wall of the parsonage in Litzelstetten, Konstanz, written in Volapük and German:

Menade bal – püki bal
Eine Menschheit – eine Sprache
(One mankind – one language)

Schleyer first published a sketch of Volapük in May 1879 in Sionsharfe, a Catholic poetry magazine of which he was editor. This was followed in 1880 by a full-length book in German. Schleyer himself did not write books on Volapük in other languages, but other authors soon did.

André Cherpillod writes of the third Volapük convention,

In August 1889 the third convention was held in Paris. About two hundred people from many countries attended. And, unlike in the first two conventions, people spoke only Volapük. For the first time in the history of mankind, sixteen years before the Boulogne convention, an international convention spoke an international language.[6]

The Dutch cryptographer Auguste Kerckhoffs was for a number of years Director of the Academy of Volapük, and introduced the movement to several countries.[7] The French Association for the Propagation of Volapük was authorized on 8 April 1886, with A. Lourdelet as president and a central committee that included the deputy Edgar Raoul-Duval.[8] However, tensions arose between Kerckhoffs and others in the Academy, who wanted reforms made to the language, and Schleyer, who insisted strongly on retaining his proprietary rights. This led to schism, with much of the Academy abandoning Schleyer's Volapük in favor of Idiom Neutral and other new constructed language projects. Another reason for the decline of Volapük may have been the rise of Esperanto. In 1887 the first Esperanto book (Unua Libro) was published. Many Volapük clubs became Esperanto clubs.[9]

By 1890 the movement was in disarray, with violent arguments among the members. Schleyer resigned from the Volapük Academy and created a rival academy. Derived languages such as Nal Bino, Balta, Bopal, Spelin, Dil and Orba were invented and quickly forgotten.[10][11]

1898 broadsheet advertising Volapük.

In the 1920s, Arie de Jong, with the consent of the leaders of the small remnant of Volapük speakers, made a revision of Volapük which was published in 1931 (now called Volapük Nulik "New Volapük" as opposed to the Volapük Rigik 'Original Volapük' of Schleyer). This revision was accepted by the few speakers of the language. De Jong simplified the grammar, eliminating some rarely used verb forms, and eliminated some gendered pronouns and gendered verb endings. He also rehabilitated the phoneme /r/ and used it to make some morphemes more recognizable. For instance, lömib "rain" became rein.[12] Volapük enjoyed a brief renewal of popularity in the Netherlands and Germany under de Jong's leadership, but was suppressed (along with other constructed languages) in countries under Nazi rule and never recovered.

Regarding the success of this constructed language, the Spanish scientist Santiago Ramón y Cajal wrote in the first edition of his Tonics of Willingness, in 1898:

Nowadays, many scientific papers are published in more than six languages. To the likely attempt of restoring Latin or using Esperanto as the universal language of science, wise men have responded by multiplying the number of languages in which scientific works are published. We have to acknowledge that Volapük or Esperanto are practically one more language to be learnt. This result was predictable because neither the essentially popularized and democratic tendencies of modern knowledge, nor the economic views of authors and editors consent in a different way.[13]

However, some years later (1920), in the third edition of the same book, he added the following footnote to the former assertion: "As it was presumable, nowadays -1920-, the brand new Volapük has been forgotten definitively. We forecast the same for Esperanto."

Large Volapük collections are held by the International Esperanto Museum[14] in Vienna, Austria; the Center for Documentation and Study about the International Language in La Chaux-de-Fonds, Switzerland; and the American Philosophical Society in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.[15] In 2000 there were an estimated 20 Volapük speakers in the world.[1]

In December 2007 it was reported that the Volapük version of Wikipedia had recently jumped to 15th place among language editions, with more than 112,000 articles.[16] A few months earlier there had been only 797 articles. The massive increase in the size of "Vükiped", bringing it ahead of the Esperanto Wikipedia, was due to an enthusiast who had used a computer program to automatically create geographical articles, many on small villages. The motive was to gain visibility for the language.[17] By March 2013 the Esperanto Wikipedia, with a very active user community, had risen to 176,792 articles, while the Volapük Wikipedia had at that point 119,091 articles.[18]

There has been a continuous Volapük speaker community since Schleyer's time, with an unbroken succession of Cifals (leaders). These were:

1. Johann Martin Schleyer 1879–1912
2. Albert Sleumer 1912–1948
3. Arie de Jong (provisionally) 1947–1948,[19] 1951–1957[20]
4. Jakob Sprenger 1948–1950
5. Johann Schmidt 1950–1977
6. Johann Krüger 1977–1983
7. Brian Bishop 1984–2014
8. Hermann Philipps 2014–present[21][22]

Schleyer proposed alternate forms for the umlaut vowels, but they were rarely used.

The alphabet is as follows:[23][24][25]

That is, the vowel letters ä, ö, ü have the pronunciations they do in German, roughly like English end, fern, über. C is pronounced like English j or ch, and j like English sh, or like the s in English "usually". /s/ is pronounced [z] after voiced consonants, for example bs, ds, gs, ls, as plural -s is in English. R was not found in the original proposal.

There are no diphthongs; each vowel letter is pronounced separately.

The letters ä, ö, and ü do not have alternative forms such as the ae, oe, and ue of German, but Schleyer proposed alternate forms ꞛ, ꞝ, and ꞟ for them, all of which are part of Unicode since version 7.0 released in June 2014:[26]

• U+A79A Ꞛ LATIN CAPITAL LETTER VOLAPUK AE
• U+A79B ꞛ LATIN SMALL LETTER VOLAPUK AE
• U+A79C Ꞝ LATIN CAPITAL LETTER VOLAPUK OE
• U+A79D ꞝ LATIN SMALL LETTER VOLAPUK OE
• U+A79E Ꞟ LATIN CAPITAL LETTER VOLAPUK UE
• U+A79F ꞟ LATIN SMALL LETTER VOLAPUK UE

Schleyer adapted the vocabulary mostly from English, with a smattering of German and French. Some words remain readily recognizable for a speaker of one of the source languages, but many others are modified beyond easy recognition.[27] For instance, vol and pük are derived from the English words world and speak. Although unimportant linguistically, and regardless of the simplicity and consistency of the stress rule, these deformations were greatly mocked by the language's detractors. It seems to have been Schleyer's intention, however, to alter its loan words in such a way that they would be hard to recognise, thus losing their ties to the languages (and, by extension, nations) from which they came. Conversely, Esperanto and Interlingua are commonly criticized as being much easier to learn for Europeans than for those with non-European native languages.[28]

The grammar is based on that of typical European languages, but with an agglutinative character: grammatical inflections are indicated by stringing together separate affixes for each element of meaning.

The word Volapük or a variation thereof means "nonsense, gibberish" in certain languages, such as Danish[32] volapyk and Esperanto volapukaĵo.[33] In Russian, the term Volapuk encoding refers to writing Cyrillic letters with the Latin alphabet based on what they look like, for example writing "BOJTATTI-OK" instead of волапюк.

• Kosmopolan
• Volapük Wikipedia
• Esperanto
• Ido
• Interlingua

• The Volapük-language Wikipedia's page on Volapük
• A Volapük portal, with links to grammar, vocabulary, exercises etc
• Description and history of the Volapük Academy
• Links to sundry background materials