Not too long ago, I received word of the effort to beatify
Father Johann Martin Schleyer (1831-1912), a parish priest from Litzelstetten in the vicinity of Lake Konstanz, who was rescued from obscurity by a divine message and a series of near-miraculous events which characterized his later life.
Schleyer, a cranky genius who was vexed throughout his life by the twin evils of Socialism and insomnia, devoted much energy to the problem of international communication. After several abortive efforts at increasing communication between the peoples of the world (the earliest being a "National Alphabet," a system of 37 letters which could express the sounds of any language in the world), he was visited by God one sleepless night in March of 1879 while battling insomnia. God told Schleyer that he had chosen him to create a
new language that everyone in the world could speak. Schleyer, who by his own account spoke more than sixty languages fluently, complied, and the result was . Within a year, he had developed the grammar for an eminently simple, rational idiom, which he named Volapük (the "World Language").
The vocabulary of Volapük was derived largely from English, although the roots were so thoroughly deformed as to render them completely incomprehensible even to speakers of that language. A linguist at heart, Schleyer's main concern was the phonology of the language; he intended to make his language as easy for the diverse peoples of the world to pronounce as was phonologically possible. For this reason he eliminated the phoneme /r/, as it is easily confused in many languages of the world (one may well wonder why he chose to include umlauts in his language). A few examples from Charles E. Sprague's
Hand-Book of Volapük (New York, 1887) will suffice to give you a feel for this language:
Eflapobok me spatin at!
I have struck myself with this walking stick!
Dälobok ladetön penedi at ole.
I permit myself to address this letter to you.
Ofunolok!
You will kill yourself!
Siadolokös e mekolokös kotenik.
Please seat yourself and make yourself contented.
Aikel löfomok gudikumo ka nileli okik, no binom krit velatik; ab krits velatik löfoms okis.
Whoever loves himself better than his neighbor is not a true Christian, but true Christians love each other.
So flexible and rational was Schleyer's brainchild, that an enterprising Volapükist could derive 504,440 verbal forms from a single root, by combining prefixes and suffixes in the manner of Turkish (which was one of Schleyer's inspirations).
At this point you may well be asking yourself, why should we care? Who gives a fig about the insane pet project of some obscure German priest? Well, by the year Sprague's
Hand-Book was published, some quarter of a million people throughout the world had flocked to Schleyer's banner and were speaking Volapük; some accounts place this number closer to a million. According to Paul LaFarge (from whose
article in the
Village Voice I've culled much of the following),
Volapük primers were printed in 21 languages, and the dictionary had grown from 2782 to more than 20,000 words. At the Third Volapük International Congress, held in 1889, everyone spoke Volapük, even the porters and the waiters. There were Volapük societies from Sydney to San Francisco, at least 25 Volapük periodicals, including the Cogabled ("Jest Book"), which printed nothing but Volapük humor. The language was so popular that many people considered the question of universal communication settled once and for all. An English scholar named Alexander Ellis, in a report to the London Philological Society, concluded that "all those who desire the insubstantiation of that 'phantom of a universal language' which has flitted before so many minds, from the days of the Tower of Babel, should, I think, add their voice to the many thousands who are ready to exclaim lifom-ös Volapük, long live Volapük!"
The Third Volapük International Congress was held in Paris. The Eiffel Tower had just opened, part of the Exposition of 1889; thousands of visitors gawked at the elevators, the ironwork, the view from the top, and, far below, the new electric street lamps on the Champs-Élysées. Things that had seemed impossible 50 years ago were now on sale at reduced prices, and the wonders promised never to end. In this giddy spirit the delegates—speaking to one another entirely in Volapük, remember—voted to establish an International Academy to govern the language's future. They elected a French-speaking Dutchman, Auguste Kerckhoffs, as the academy's president. Lifom-ös Volapük! they cried. They couldn't know that they had gone too far, or that their language would soon fall apart.
Note that, according to this little gem from the folklore of constructed language enthusiasts, even the
French waiters at the Third Volapük International Congress spoke fluent Volapük. The idea truly defies imagining. The sky truly seemed to be the limit for Schleyer's international language. LaFarge continues,
Kerckhoffs was the author of a popular Volapük grammar (as well as a study of monumental art and a history of military cryptography, among other works). He believed that Volapük was too complicated—not unreasonably, given that, by combining prefixes and suffixes, you could make as many as 504,440 forms from a single verb. Kerckhoffs proposed reducing the number of noun cases and verb tenses, which would have simplified things considerably. But Father Schleyer would not allow anyone to change the language he had created at God's behest. He demanded the right to veto the academy's decisions; Kerckhoffs refused, and they fought for control of the language until Kerckhoffs resigned from the academy in 1891. Schleyer, meanwhile, had decided that no one but him should have any say in Volapük at all; he formed his own academy, composed entirely of people who agreed with him.
The Volapükists didn't know whom to support. Some local societies sided with Schleyer, others with Kerckhoffs. Worse, now that Kerckhoffs had pointed out a few of Volapük's flaws, everyone wanted to tinker with the language. Because Schleyer retained absolute control over Volapük, their only recourse was to invent languages of their own. Dialects multiplied: The years 1893-1907 saw the emergence of Dil, Veltparl, Dilpok, Idiom neutral, Lingua european, and Idiom neutral reformed, all of them derived from Volapük. It was the Tower of Babel all over again, only this time the humans managed to confound their tongues without supernatural help. The story of Volapük's disintegration makes you wonder whether the evolution of language was nothing but a series of spats between people too proud to compromise. One hominid wants to call fire fuh and the other wants to call it ig; they go their separate ways, and a few thousand years later they have become Germans and Romans, and they're still bickering.
Now, it is obvious to me that Volapük (despite its many flaws) had
momentum to a degree that no other universal language has ever had, before or since. Volapük's spectacular failure set the stage for many more such failures, and damaged the self esteem of the universal language crowd to an extent from which they have never fully recovered. It was many years before any other such language could claim as many adherents (and the largest by far, Esperanto, continues to hover at a million or so speakers, depending on whom you ask). It is also clear to me that, were it not for Schleyer's stubborn intransigence or de Jong's neurotic desire to tinker with Schleyer's invention, Volapük might be still with us yet. Given its momentum and the immense quantities of energy and money invested in its spread, an army of totally fanatic devotees, and the missionary zeal of Schleyer himself, there is no reason why it would not continue to spread.
What if one of Schleyer's Orthodox Volapük stalwarts (such as Charles E. Sprague himself) had been appointed in Kerckhoffs' stead?
What if, instead of opposing his attempts at linguistic reform, Schleyer given his blessing to Kerckhoffs? Would Volapük come to challenge English and French for supremacy in the 20th century? What would a world characterized by a successful international auxiliary language be like? What developments would International Volapükism have upon the politics of the 20th century? Would we truly have
Menad Bal, Pük Bal (One Human Race, One Language)? What developments would it have upon religion (remember, Schleyer was on a mission from God)? Certainly, had Volapük survived, Schleyer would find himself on the fast track for canonization.