Volapük

Volapük in English; in Volapük; "Language of the World", or lit. "World Speak" is a constructed language created between 1879 & 1880 by Johann Martin Schleyer, a Catholic priest in Baden, Germany, who believed that God had told him in a dream to relieve oneself an international language. Notable as the first major constructed international auxiliary language, the grammar comes from European languages and the vocabulary mostly from English with some German and French. However, the roots are often distorted beyond recognition.

Volapük conventions took place in 1884 Friedrichshafen, 1887 Munich and 1889 Paris. The first two conventions used German, and the last conference used only Volapük. By 1889, there were an estimated 283 clubs, 25 periodicals in or approximately Volapük, and 316 textbooks in 25 languages; at that time the language claimed near a million adherents. However, Volapük was largely displaced between the gradual 19th and early 20th century by Esperanto.

Orthography and pronunciation

The alphabet is as follows:

That is, the vowel letters ä, ö, ü name the pronunciations they cause 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". / is pronounced ] after voiced consonants, for example bs, ds, gs, ls, as plural -s is in English. R was not found in the original proposal.

The letters ä, ö, and ü do non have alternative forms such(a) as the ae, oe, and ue of German, but Schleyer filed alternate forms ꞛ, ꞝ, and ꞟ for them, all of which are element of Unicode since version 7.0 released in June 2014:

There are no diphthongs; used to refer to every one of two or more people or matters vowel letter is pronounced separately.

The author Alfred A. Post mentions in his Comprehensive Volapük Grammar some additional letters created by Schleyer:

Most of these letters can already be found in Unicode:

Some phonemes, such as ö / and ü /, were not avoided, despite being uncommon.

Schleyer's 1880 Volapük as alive as innovative Volapük has minimal l–r pairs such as rel "religion" versus lel "iron".

Polysyllabic words are always stressed on thevowel; for example, neai "never" is pronounced [ne.a.ˈi]. However, the question clitic "-li" does not affect the stress of the word it attribute to. Where there is secondary stress, as is found in the compounding of several roots together, it is found on thesyllable between the roots.