Advert in the May 1896 issue of Kosmopolan (Cosmopolitan), an Australia-based quarterly gazette dedicated to propagating VolapĆ¼k.
(For those who don't know, a world language invented by Catholic priest Johann Martin Schleyer that was initially wildly popular, but ultimately supplanted by Esperanto and weakened by internal divisions within its movement.)
I took a stab at an English translation below. I thought this was an interesting snapshot of the state of VolapĆ¼k at a time when Esperanto was gaining traction, yet the VolapĆ¼k movement, even amidst the chaos of the 1890s, was not at all dead.
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Martin Schleyer, creator of VolapĆ¼k, was born in 1831.
On this day in 1831 Martin Schleyer, a German Catholic priest who invented the constructed language VolapĆ¼k, was born. His official name was "Martin Schleyer"; he added the name "Johann" (in honor of his godfather) unofficially.
Schleyer felt that God had told him in a dream to create an international language. VolapĆ¼k would go on to become one of the most successful auxiliary languages with nearly a million adherents. However it was largely displaced in the late 19th and early 20th centuries by Esperanto.
CW: mentions of period-typical racism and classism
I have to shove Altaicist Bowser off the keyboard because we need to talk. And because I'm one of the only people who's looking at these texts that are over a century old in the big 26, I think this is worth stating for the record as old-auxlang-posting continues.
It may not come as a surprise, but a lot of these early auxlangers (19th century especially) were pretty alarmingly racist. There are many examples of interlanguage books explicitly invoking white supremacist themes, and the majority of the languages I've come across in my research (even a priori languages) were constructed with very clear Eurocentric bias, which is sometimes even explicitly intended and avowed.
If you want to see those examples for your knowledge I will share them, but I won't embed them here, for obvious reasons and also because I think it will distract from the point. I haven't even begun to talk about the American Philosophical Society correspondence in the late 1880s, which is full of this sort of racism. I'll get into that situation sometime sooner or later because I think it's an important part of auxlang history, but...
I think this is yet another example of why no IAL will ever succeed to the extent of being adopted as an nth language officially across one or more regions and used as a common language. An IAL is never going to be intuitive for everyone of any cultural, or socioeconomic background. And in the late 19th century especially, during the auxlang heyday started in great part by VolapĆ¼k's invention in 1879, the intent of being truly international was far from the average European auxlanger's mind.
It should be clear by now, as one might have guessed given the time period, that interlinguistics in the 19th and 20th centuries was at every stage the prerogative of the straight, white, educated man. It's even more than just the explicitly racist elements. Not only the act of creating the languages themselves, not only the intended audience, but the very morphological and even phonological underpinnings of many of these languages were created in ignorance of poor, non-Western, non-white, and/or non-straight people at best, and outright scorn at worst.
On the receiving end, this was still not the sort of thing that would normally be accessible to those without an education, or even in many ways to those with vision or learning impairments, or those who are not able-bodied. How, then, could a language be truly universal?
When you are able to artificially construct a language from the ground up, especially one intended for widespread use, you are also able to encode a worldview into its structure. This was an opportunity used by many of these auxlangers to reinforce institutionally and internationally racist ideologies and practices. The fact that most of these languages had relatively small audiences and faded into obscurity does not make that any less true or any less damaging.
I don't want to get too political. This is a page for silly shit and linguistics. However, as a white conlanger, I feel like it's important to make it clear from the beginning that my sharing information about the many questionable linguistic decisions made by these auxlangers is not intended as any condonement or tolerance of their violently discriminatory worldviews or the actively exclusionary features of their languages. But, I think those pitfalls should be evident, and kept in mind when critically examining their work. When you look at an old auxlang and see some feature that makes you think, 'that isn't really international! speakers of non-Western languages won't find that intuitive! etc.'... just know that, more often than not, it's by design.
As a follow-up to my ask-answer about typing diacritics in the early IALs, I found a good set of minimal pairs showing why replacing the VolapĆ¼k Ƥ ƶ Ć¼ with ae oe ue doesn't work:
kaen "technique, technicality" vs. kƤn "cannon"
toenik "ringing, resounding" vs. tƶnik "tenacious, tough"
pued "chastity" vs. pĆ¼d "tranquility, peace"
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I was reading the earlier edition of the Nunel valemik from December 1888 since I was going to translate it, and I think there's something to be said for the gender imbalance of the people involved in the VolapĆ¼k movement and the general auxlanging movement of the 19th century. And I don't just mean in an "oh it was just patriarchal that's just how it was" sort of way.
During the early days of VolapĆ¼k's existence, one of the main commonly touted draws was its potential use for business communications - that is, being able to use a single, precise language that bridges ethnic and linguistic gaps and makes communicating across the world easy. While this was not necessarily Schleyer's own doing directly, he and other VolapĆ¼k supporters had always sought to elevate VolapĆ¼k's status in the world to equal modern natural languages, and using it in business was one way of doing that. The VolapĆ¼k Commercial Correspondent (Spodel tedelik VolapĆ¼ka) was popular among speakers when it came out in 1889, and there was also discussion of teaching the language at schools and higher learning institutions for the purposes of international communication.
In the late 19th century, this was overwhelmingly the prerogative of men. Many universities and apprenticeship programs explicitly barred women, and the kinds of jobs that did allow women and girls were grueling, dangerous, and/or required little communication with others. Meanwhile, middle-and upper-class women usually did not work, so it was men who had far more incentive to learn the language. So, women, while nominally allowed within the movement, were in practice largely excluded from any benefits it could have provided and were not in most public-facing roles promoting the language.
The result is similar to the result of a lot of misogyny: a bunch of men doing most of the more publicly visible work and getting the credit, because that's the demographic VolapĆ¼k would have appealed to the most - white, straight, middle-class men who talk to other white, straight, middle-class men.
This text, from the very same section of the very same periodical from just a month later, proudly reported that "numerous" (Vp. lemƶdik) women were in attendance at a large gathering of VolapĆ¼k speakers in Hamburg, Germany on November 23rd, 1888. How many of the nearly four hundred attendees can we guess were women? How many women is lemƶdik? 10? 20? 100?
as early as 1921, Sapir noted the major sources of languages in the world were Latin, Arabic, Sanskrit and Midieval Chinese, and Modern Chinese-English and Hindi-English grammars were available as early as the early 19th century - yet Eurocentrism. Honestly even a Europe-Middle East-India-China-centrism of the āGreat Civilizationsā sense that Toynbee wrote in would have been inclusive albeit dated
Honestly, āEurocentricā doesnāt even fully describe how narrow their scope was.
Many conlangers of the day also specifically ignored Germanic (often called āTeutonicā) elements as well. Some openly disliked its compound nouns, its apparent dissimilarities with other languages of western Europe, and its supposedly harsh sound. The result was that Romance āinternationalā languages were a dime a dozen, none of them particularly distinct from each other in any interesting way.
Ironically, the two most popular auxlangs in the entire 19th century were created by a German and a Pole!
If you want further reading, I will once again plug Johanna Pinkās excellent analysis of a partial translation of the Holy Qurāan into VolapĆ¼k that Fr. Schleyer completed in 1890, which contextualizes just how parochial the languageās intellectual reach was.
