What made a Catholic priest related to a revolutionary and famous writers, how to confess love using only the names of notes, and what difficulties the creator of one of the first artificial languages had to face.
Artificial languages were created by very different people. For example, Adam (Eugene) Lanti was a man who "opposed everything": self-taught, anarchist, then a socialist, the creator of the theory of non-nationalism and an Esperantist. Writers also invented them. For example, Anthony Burgess created the Nadsat language, Orwell - Newspeak, John Tolkien - Kvenyu and Sindarin … A striking contrast with them and many other adherents of international languages is the creator of the earlier and only slightly inferior to Esperanto in terms of popularity, Volapuk, Johann Martin Schleier. A Catholic priest, he managed to introduce conservatism even into his project of an international language, the very idea of which (remember the Tower of Babel) is audacity. But more on that later.
Peculiar analogues of international languages have appeared since antiquity, but then they could not acquire a wide scope, and even more so of world significance. A kind of analogue of the international language can be, for example, Koine, which appeared in the territories conquered by Alexander the Great, or the Mediterranean lingua franca, which served in the Middle Ages for communication between Arabs, Turks and Europeans (later the phrase lingua franca became a common noun and now denotes the language of interethnic communication) …
Map of the territories conquered by Alexander the Great
Both languages were not an independent language, but rather a pidgin - a mixture of several languages with a simplified grammar and flexible vocabulary. In modern times, several projects of artificial languages appeared, associated with secret societies, mysticism and alchemy. For example, the Enochian language invented by the English mathematician, astronomer, hermeticist John Dee. The language of Solresol, proposed by the French musician Jean François Soudre, in which words consisted of the names of notes (it really sounds like music: "dore milasi domi" - "I love you") deserves mention. The idea of a universal language was also developed in the 17th-18th centuries (for example, the mathematician Gottfried Leibniz), but the creator of the first successful artificial language was, as we have already said, a Catholic priest.
Johann Martin Schleier was the third generation son of a Baden teacher. On the other hand, there were many church ministers in the family, and our hero followed in their footsteps. Prior to that, he managed to unlearn at the University of Freiburg, where he studied classical languages and theology. Probably, there is still a connection, and quite strong, between languages and music: in his student years he played seven instruments, and in total he will learn to play at 18. And he will speak several dozen languages.
Johann Martin Schleier
By 1879, Schleier lived in a small town in southern Germany, wrote poetry on patriotic and religious themes, and published the magazine Sionsharfe ("Zion harp"). It was then with Schleier that something happened that pushed him to create a Volapuk. “In some mysterious and mystical way, on a dark night in the pastor's house in Litzelstatt, near Constance, in a corner room on the second floor overlooking the garden, when I was thinking about the stupidity, offenses, hardships and calamities of our time, the whole system of my international language suddenly appeared before my inner gaze in all its splendor,”he later recalled.
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But in order to create an artificial language, it takes a lot of time, even if you have a clear idea of what it will be. First of all, Schleier developed a phonetic alphabet, with the help of which it would be possible to equally write proper names in any language of the world and understand what is written even for those who do not know the rules for reading a particular language. Perhaps he was prompted to this work by the reform of the German language that followed the unification of Germany, which was then actively discussed and which many did not like. Schleier proposed his project to the Universal Postal Union, which even published it in its official publication, but that was all.
Creating the grammar of the new language, Schleier took a lot from German: its four cases, six tenses, the principle of the formation of compound words (which was also the word Volapük - from vola - "world" in the genitive case and pük - "to speak"). The alphabet was based on Latin, two more phonetic alphabets were used to convey the names and titles of natural languages. Most of the roots of Volapuk are taken from English and French (the same vol and pük are transformed world and speak).
For the first time Schleier spoke about Volapuk in his Sionsharfe in May 1879, in 1880 he published a detailed grammar. The new language attracted attention and soon became very popular (in comparison with other projects): books were written in it, magazines and textbooks were published, conferences were convened. However, by the end of the 1880s, its popularity began to decline.
One of the possible reasons for Volapuk's failure is called Schleier's attachment to umlauts, which are unusual for speakers of most languages. "A language without umlauts sounds monotonous, rude and boring," Schleier wrote. Either he really put considerations of aesthetics above convenience, or he simply could not part with his familiar sounds, but he stubbornly resisted criticism from many Volapiukist comrades-in-arms, who believed that if this language was destined to become supranational, then umlauts should be gotten rid of.
Alternative forms for umlauted vowels suggested by Schleier
Another point of controversy was the "r" sound. Schleier initially avoided him "for the sake of children and old people, as well as Asian peoples." Later, he began to include more words with this sound in dictionaries. However, its creator remained deaf to other areas of criticism of Volapyuk: here one can include grammatical difficulties inherited from German, and imperfect transmission of sounds, and roots of words alien to all (and not “close to many”, as it might be).
All this led to controversies that severely damaged the popularity of the language. By 1890, the movement split, many versions of Volapuk appeared, and some of its supporters even switched to Esperanto, which had arisen three years earlier. An attempt to revive the language in the 1920s was undertaken by the Dutch Volapukist Ari de Jong. He simplified grammar, began to use the "r" sound more often, which replaced the "l" often used instead, and made the roots of words more recognizable. However, this did not help either, and in the 20th century Volapuk lost to Esperanto, and the number of its supporters dropped to several dozen. Nevertheless, now it is still supported: in this language, for example, there is a whole section of Wikipedia.
Author: Alena Manuzina