Newsgroups: sci.lang,talk.politics.european-union,uk.politics
Path: cantaloupe.srv.cs.cmu.edu!rochester!udel!news.mathworks.com!news.kei.com!hermes.oc.com!internet.spss.com!markrose
From: markrose@spss.com (Mark Rosenfelder)
Subject: Re: Single European Language
Message-ID: <DAMyr8.7yE@spss.com>
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References: <DA5BJG.9yx@indirect.com> <3scstf$1j7@news.ox.ac.uk>
Date: Fri, 23 Jun 1995 17:18:40 GMT
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In article <3scstf$1j7@news.ox.ac.uk>,
Alan Iwi <lady0077@sable.ox.ac.uk> wrote:
>>   All languages are beautiful.  Maybe even Volapuk.
>For those not in the know... Volap"uk was an *extremely* unsuccessful 
>attempt at an international language.

Not at all; it was an extremely *successful* attempt at an international
language, as these things go.  For one late 19C Volapuk congress, the
Galeries Lafayette department store in Paris was said to be teaching 
Volapuk to its clerks.  

Volapuk has approximately the same relation to Esperanto as VisiCalc has
to Lotus: that of an earlier and slightly less successful rival.
That's why Esperantists continue to make fun of Volapuk and spread
disinformation about it, a century after Esperanto eclipsed Volapuk
in the conlang game.

Volapuk marks a transition in artificial-language creation, between the
arbitrary schemes which had been popular for more than a century (every
philosopher dreamed of a universal scheme for classifying language)
and more 'naturalistic' approaches generally taking their vocabulary
from existing languages.  This mixture is evident even in the lexicon;
Volapuk includes arbitrary inventions (such as the inflections and the
numbers-- _bal_ was 'one', if I remember correctly) as well as borrowings 
(e.g. _lo"b_ 'love').
