Talk:Volapük

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

	This article is within the scope of the WikiProject Languages, an attempt at creating a standardized, informative, and easy-to-use resource about languages. If you would like to participate, please visit the project page, where you can join the project and see a list of open tasks.	language Portal
???	This article has not yet received a rating on the quality scale.

If there's no objection, I'm going to move this back to Volapuk. The "language" disambiguator is unnatural with languages that have their own names, rather than being derived adjectives (and thus don't have anything to disambiguate against!) --Brion 19:28 Sep 23, 2002 (UTC)

De Gaulle said something about volapuk, (really !) I should verify where and when.... Réf : http://www.dna.fr/dna/pflimlin/4431_0.html

Volapük just don't get no respect, it seems. :) --Brion

It has some pejorative sense in France since... Mainly used for European Affairs and mainly by anti-europeans the abominable Jean-Marie Le Pen use it sometimes.

Could someone translate the links in (presumably) Volapük at the bottom of the article? This is an English article, after all... --cprompt

I commented out the Volapuk text. If you can, please translate to English and restore to the article. --cprompt 04:24, 18 Apr 2004 (UTC)

• I've redirected Volapuk to this article. I've requested that this article is moved to Volapük. ··gracefool |☺ 08:41, 15 Jun 2005 (UTC)

Contents 1 The a in Volapük 2 Number of V speakers? 3 Where is the largest Volapük collection? 4 "A great name for a brilliant idea" 5 Origin of the idea 6 Fraktur 7 Naming fix, again 8 Independence of Vp movement 9 Number of words 9.1 O Fat Obas ?! 9.2 Number of conjugations?

[edit] The a in Volapük

I have a question about Volapük I believe should be addressed in the article: is the a in Volapük connective, or genitive, or what?

It's genitive. I just added a section on compound formation. --Jim Henry 19:23, 30 Jun 2004 (UTC)

[edit] Number of V speakers?

"There are an estimated 20-30 Volapük speakers in the world today."

Can this number be correct? Should it not be 20-30 THOUSAND?

I don't think so. It was only 100,000 at its peak 115 years ago, and has been in decline ever since. Googling about reveals (unsurprisingly) that no-one knows the exact number, but it was described as "a handful" in the 1960s, and more recently an Esperanto speaker described it as at most in the low triple digits, most of whom are Esperantists learning a different conlang for comaprison purposes. Securiger 12:06, 21 Jun 2004 (UTC)

20,000 or more is far too much, but I think 20-30 is too little, considering the astonishinh activity on the internet. It is impossible that 20-30 people, of whom certainly a lot would be elderly and probably incapable of creating a web site, can be so present at the World Wide Web. And indeed most of them will be Esperanto speakers as well, and most of them will be freaks whose pleasure is to learn as many languages as possible (like me fyi :)), but it is too vivid a movement to be that little.--Caesarion 12:43, 16 Feb 2005 (UTC)

"Astonishing activity on the internet"? There are two mailing lists, with low traffic and not many posters (though a larger number of subscribers). There are four major websites I know of; I think only three of them are maintained by fluent speakers of the language, the other is by a man who is interested in Volapük historically but is not a speaker. Most of the other web hits are mentions of V on websites of language buffs who are interested in the language but not apparently fluent speakers. I think 20-30 is almost certainly within one decimal order of magnitude of the correct value. --Jim Henry 15:28, 16 Feb 2005 (UTC)

I guess you're right, that means that the actual number of speakers lies between 1 and 999, including the bordering elements. That is quite vague indeed. In my humble opinion, two mailing lists and three websites is still to be called "astonishing activity" if there are only 20-30 speakers today. Not all speakers are to be found on the internet!--Caesarion 17:57, 17 Feb 2005 (UTC)

Perhaps I misused the term; I meant "between 2 and 200". Actually, I would be very surprised if the number of fluent speakers is over 50. Not all speakers are found on the Internet, but if all known people on the Internet who read and write Volapük fluently also speak it fluently (a questionable assumption), and there are ten non-Internet users for every Internet user among fluent Volapük speakers, that would still be well under 200.

But if you count everyone who has ever studied Volapük enough to (painstakingly, with frequent references to dictionaries) write an email in Volapük, you might get as many as 1000.

Possibly I could ask on the main Volapük mailing list for further input on this, but previous requests to the list for input on the Wikipedia article have not gotten results. --Jim Henry 18:22, 17 Feb 2005 (UTC)

I'd say that it's quite amazing that it has a fairly large Wikipedia base. It's at least larger than Lojban, Interlingua. I would say that either there is more than one contributor to vo.wikipedia.org, or there is one VERY active member. Of course, they could qualify under the list of people who fit in: "painstakingly, with frequent references to dictionaries". So, I don't know how useful it is. Sadly, I am certain that there are more speakers of Volapük than my language *sigh*. --Puellanivis 22:56, 25 September 2006 (UTC)

Maybe it's not so surprising. I am one of the contributors to the Volapük Wikipedia (with an article on Auguste Kerckhoffs and one on the Cifal Statutes (drafted by Cifal Sleumer); I will be trying (as time allows...) to add further articles on past and present Volapükists and other information in the language. Looking a bit around, I was unable to find even one single article that had "article structure": most of them are one- or two-sentence definitions with very little information. It does look like the kind of work one or two people could do in, say, a couple of days, if they were simply thinking of increasing the number of papers as much as possible by writing as little as possible. The one exception -- the "Introduction to Volapük" -- is actually in English! Maybe I am a little pessimistic; but my current guess is that there are maybe 4-5 fluent speakers, 10-20 people capable of writing or reading texts without (too much) need of a dictionary (a cumulative total, which includes the first 4-5...), 20-50 people currently interested, trying to learn and read Volapük texts, 50-100 people who either are or were interested enough in the language to have learned something at some point in life, 100-1000 people who know what Volapük is (i.e. not a rock band or a system for mimically transcribing Cyrillic letters) and saw once something written in the language. Maybe with Andrew Drummond's novel, A Hand-book of Volapük, interest will be renewed and more people will hear about it; but right now I think there are more speakers of, and people interested in, the Klingon language than in Volapük... (Did you notice that the Klingon Language Institute website has a page in (old) Volapük?) Sérgio Meira 00:22 27 Oct 2006

[edit] Where is the largest Volapük collection?

An earlier version of the article had this sentence:

"The International Esperanto Museum in Vienna (Austria) holds the world's biggest collection of Volapük literature."

After adding notes on other large collections, I removed the note about IEM having the largest collection, because another source (the Esperanto Wikipedia article on Esperanto libraries) claimed that CDELI had the largest Volapük collection. If anyone can confirm that one claim or the other is true, we can note which has the largest collection.

I posted on the Volapük listgroup asking about this but have no reply yet. --Jim Henry 18:55, 30 Jun 2004 (UTC)

A little research in their websites suggests that the Österreichische Nationalbibliothek collection (Vienna) has more listed titles relating to Volapük (ca. 100 to 60 in CDSLI). But I'm not sure they've got everything in their internet archives, and the ONB search engine (TROVANTO) is often unavailable. It may be worthwhile to visit both places once and compare. Sérgio Meira 00:42 27 Oct 2006

[edit] "A great name for a brilliant idea"

194.230.21.229 added a link to a nonexistent article Volapük - A great name for a brilliant idea to the external links section. I removed it. My guess is this person was trying to link to an external page and wasn't sure how. If you want to add an article on that theme, think about whether it fits Wikipedia's neutral point-of-view rules. Maybe you should instead add more text (in neutral tone) to this article about the advantages of Volapük over other languages? --Jim Henry 20:05, 1 Sep 2004 (UTC)

[edit] Origin of the idea

From Johann Martin Schleyer:

According to his own report, the idea of an international language arose out of a conversation he had with one of his parishioners, a semi-literate German peasant whose son had emigrated to America and could no longer be reached by mail because the United States Postal Service couldn't read the father's handwriting.

From the article:

Schleyer felt that God had told him in a dream to create an international language.

Unless God is a semi-literate German peasant, which is inconsistent with Catholic dogma, at least one of the accounts is wrong.

Well the idea came from the peasant and then God told him to act on it.

Actually, the peasant did not give him the idea for the language, but merely for an international alphabet. The version of the story I know is that the peasant's handwriting was readable to the US Postal Service, but that the peasant, not knowing how to spell US city names in English, spelled them in German according to whatever pronunciation he had for them (for example, if the son lived in Tucson, maybe the father wrote Tüsen, or Tüksen?), so they didn't know where to send the letters to. The son actually never got any of the letters his father wrote, and the father in question was getting sad, thinking his son had forgotten his roots. Then Schleyer had the idea of inventing a universal alphabet, a sort of primitive IPA, in which things like addresses could be written and read by mail officers anywhere in the world. He actually wrote it up and sent it to the Union Postale Internationale, but as far as I know he never got any answer. As for Volapük, what Schleyer himself wrote (cf. his German text in the Volapük group) is that, years after the peasant incident, he spent one night awake, not able to sleep, and suddenly had a flash of intuition -- a revelation from God -- and started writing down the rules, playing with them, till by the end of the day he had the basics of Volapük grammar, and some words. A true prophetic revelation, if you will. (His original "international alphabet" was still used in his books -- he was very much interested in reforming the spelling of every language he had learned, and his first Volapük grammar was written in a 'reformed' version of German spelling... -- and seems to be ultimately the source of Arie de Jong's "transcription" alphabet, which occupies an important place in his "Gramat Volapüka" and was supposed to be used in Volapük texts to explain the pronunciation of every geographic word (which should written in the original spelling). Sérgio Meira 00:55 27 Oct 2006

Did I dream that I read somewhere that it was a problem with the German handwriting (some relative of Sütterlin)? --Error 02:11, 3 December 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Fraktur

In some stage, Volapuk used Fraktur-like versions of the vowels instead of umlauts.

That is not exactly true. At some point (I think before the second Volapük congress), Schleyer actually came up with the idea of inventing new letters to replace ä, ö, and ü -- a, o, and u with a little 'dent' on the right side that gave them the aspect of the old German "Frakturschrift" -- but it was not really Fraktur. It reminded me more of those Vietnamese vowels with little hooks and mustaches (marking different tonal contours). Sérgio Meira 01:52 27 Oct 2006

The Italian scanned method has examples but they are blotched in the scanning.

I added a scan from a 1888 method. Strangely, ä is an open form quite difficult to distinguish from ü. The book is in German and Fraktur letters are visibly different. --Error 02:17, 3 December 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Naming fix, again

Somebody moved this page around to places like User:Ambush Commander/Mover and Volapük language. I've put it back at Volapük where it belongs and cleaned up the redirects (except for User:Ambush Commander/Mover, not sure what that's supposed to be...) --Brion 19:33, Jun 15, 2005 (UTC)

Sorry, that was my mistake. I was testing out a theory I had about page moves and it didn't work. Everything seems to be in the right places now though... Ambush Commander 21:27, Jun 15, 2005 (UTC)

[edit] Independence of Vp movement

I revised this

...but these are Esperantists who became interested in the history of constructed languages rather than the continuation of an independent tradition.

as it seemed to be an exaggeration. Not all speakers of Volapük are also speakers of Esperanto, and certainly not all of them are "Esperantists" in the sense of being active in the Esperanto movement. Also, there is indeed a continuous though sometimes tenuous tradition in the Volapük speaker community. --Jim Henry 17:20, 9 January 2006 (UTC)

Good to know, Jim. kwami 19:37, 9 January 2006 (UTC)

Actually, there's only one speaker I've heard of who's not also a speaker of Esperanto. Even those who learned Volapük first (like, I think, the current Cifal, Brian Bishop) eventually learned also Esperanto. Cherpillod, the author of a Volapük grammar and textbook in Esperanto, is, I think, typical in this respect. So I don't think it's really an exaggeration. Or am I wrong? Can anybody mention modern Volapük speakers who are not simultaneously Esperanto speakers? (I agree that they are not necessarily Esperanto activists, but most speakers are. Do only activist get to be called Esperantists these days? When I learned it, about twelve years ago, any speaker was an Esperantist, regardless of his interest in the Movado.) My guess about the actual relationship is more or less like this: the typical Volapük learner was interested in languages, got to know Esperanto as his first artificial language, and heard about Volapük when reading about the history of Esperanto. S/he got interested and tried to find out more, felt attracted by the language, and ended up learning it, from books, or, nowadays, from Midgley's course in the internet. There may be exceptions, but my impression is that this path would describe the usual case. Sérgio Meira 01:20 27 Oct 2006

[edit] Number of words

Lang Maker says Volapuk has a Lexicon size of 1569.. does this mean it has just 1596 words, or am I just misunderstanding something? Could someone please explain? Thanks Loserdog³⁰⁰⁰ 16:54, 7 July 2006 (UTC)

I don't know where that figure came from, but it has to be way underestimated. Of the Vlapük-English dictionaries I have on my hard disk, one has 35K entries (some are duplicate German and English definitions of the same word, some are phrases rather than single words) and another, more carefully edited, has 6K entries, but can not be regarded as complete. Possibly there were 1596 root words in the earliest edition of Schleyer's Vp, but that's just a guess about where the figure came from -- more likely someone looked at a mini-glossary online and picked that figure. --Jim Henry 17:41, 7 July 2006 (UTC)

Thanks for the explanation, I was wondering how such a successful language managed to take off and have large conferences etc with such a small vocabulary. It'd be more like a pidgen! (Or I thought I'd misunderstood the word Lexicon!) Loserdog³⁰⁰⁰ 18:12, 7 July 2006 (UTC)

Yes, that's clearly an understatement. Speaking from memory, Arie de Jong's new dictionary has about 200 pages (in the Volapük-German section) with about 40 words per page; that gives you already 8000 words. If you remember that his Volapükagased pro Nedänapükans kept publishing "Vöds Nulik" (New Words) for quite a while, and that he had compiled about 10 further lists (which the Volapükagased kept mentioning were available for anybody interested in copying them), I'd say the currently sanctioned, cannonical Volapük vocabulary certainly goes beyond 10,000 words. (In the Volapük group new words are still often proposed and accepted; I have myself recently proposed -- and had the joy of seeing it accepted -- the word "plutod" as the Volapük name of the (ex-)planet Pluto, which hadn't been discovered in Arie de Jong's days... Sérgio Meira 01:42 27 Oct 2006

[edit] O Fat Obas ?!

The version of the Our Father given here is *not* in 1931-style Volapük (Arie De Jong's Volapük Perevidöl): it is actually in the original, Schleyerian form of Volapük. This should be changed!

In Danish, the word "volapyk" (y is pronounced ü in Danish) means "nonsense"! Very few Danes know the origin of this, and they laugh when they are shown a Dictionarly of Volapük (akin to "The Concise Dictionary of English-Nonsense, Nonsense-English").

[edit] Number of conjugations?

The article says a verb can be inflected 1,584 ways, but this site (in External Links) says it can be 505,440. Quite a large difference. 68.145.207.92 00:17, 25 March 2007 (UTC)