thank you to Doqually, Tangerines, and probably others for requesting this episode.
welcome to Conlang Critic, the show that gets facts wrong about YOUR favorite conlang!
I’m jan Misali, about the most superficial commentator on con-langues since the idiotic
B. Gilson, and in this episode, we’ll be looking at a failed auxlang with a name that
starts with v and has an umlaut, Volapük.
Volapük is an IAL that was created in 1879 by the late Father Johann Martin Schleyer.
at the time it was made, it quickly gained a highly negative reputation for sounding
ugly and nonsensical.
Volapük became the butt of linguistic jokes that still survive to this day, like in Dutch
where the word “volapyk” means “gibberish”, or in Russian, where “волапюк”
refers to writing Russian with the Latin Alphabet based on how letters look rather than how
they sound.
a lot of this was probably due to the sheer novelty of the idea, rather than actual flaws
with the language’s design.
as far as I’m aware, it was the first ever a posteriori auxiliary language, or, in other
words, the first language meant to be used to facilitate international communication
with vocabulary derived from existing natural languages.
this concept has been done many, many times, but Volapük is where it all started.
does it hold up to modern standards?
let’s find out I guess!
its consonants are:
this consonant inventory appears in modern Volapük, but it differs from Schleyer’s
original design somewhat.
specifically, the labiovelar approximant and the rhotic were absent originally, for the
benefit of speakers of languages like Russian, which has no w sound, and Japanese, which
has no rhotic sound.
the two sounds were added later, probably to make loanwords a bit more recognizable.
aside from that weird decision, this inventory is mostly pretty reasonable.
it’s pretty neat how most of the fricatives and affricates aren’t distinguished by voicedness.
it shows that Schleyer actually thought about what might be hard for people from different
backgrounds to pronounce, which is a big step up from how most other auxlangs’ inventories are designed.
Volapük’s vowels are:
come on, Schleyer! you were off to such a good start there with those consonants! this
vowel inventory is pretty transparently based on German and French, both of which are relatively
vowel heavy languages.
you really don’t need to look hard to find languages that are incompatible with this.
like, sure, you can kinda map it to English,
but for languages like Mandarin and Spanish you just can’t.
eight vowels is simply too many. and, yes, I know it’s possible to learn how to make
new sounds, but for an auxiliary language you really shouldn’t need to.
orthographically, Volapük is okay.
most of the decisions made here make sense.
there is the letter x used for /ks/ which I’m not a fan of, but whatever.
the extra vowels being written like they are in German is perfectly reasonable, though
they honestly just shouldn’t be there in the first place.
they also can be written with digraphs, in case you’re technologically restricted from
writing umlauts, or with these neat looking original letters Schleyer designed himself,
in case you’re technologically able to do whatever the heck you want.
Volapük’s grammar allows its speakers to do some somewhat unnecessary things.
we’re all about minimizing grammar here on Conlang Critic, and Volapük really does
not do that.
nouns have two numbers and four cases.
these are simple enough, but it gets much worse with the verbs.
so, verbs have prefixes that indicate the tense.
however, what vowel the prefix uses depends on the aspect.
then, the letter p is added to the prefix if the verb is in the passive voice.
then, if the verb is in the habitual aspect, the letter i is added to the prefix.
and then there’s also two other prefixes for the gerund forms of verbs.
this makes a total of twenty six verb prefixes, if you count the null prefix.
however, there’s also suffixes, which are used for the infinitive mood, participles,
the imperative mood, the optative mood, the jussive mood, the apodosis, and the potential mood.
that’s seven suffixes, making a total of a hundred eighty two forms of any individual
verb, but we’re still not done, because the interrogative mood and protasis are written
with two suffixes that are technically different from the other ones because you write them
with a hyphen and they’re unstressed, bringing our total number of forms of any individual
verb up to two hundred thirty four! but wait, we’re still not done because pronouns (more
on those in a bit) are also part of the verb, bringing the total up to three thousand forty two!
that’s just so many is the thing.
like, you just straight up don’t need all of these.
and while it’s certainly easier to learn this system than it would to learn a more
naturalistic system where every one of those 3042 combinations is a separate affix, and
it’s cool how you’re allowed to just ignore them and not mark any verbs, it’s still
bizarre to me that Schleyer thought that the distinction between stuff like requests, commands,
and demands was something so important that it wouldn’t be enough to just use words
for “please” and “immediately” or something, and that how politely you’re
asking someone to do something absolutely needed to be not only placed directly on the
verb, but on the stressed syllable of the verb.
the vocabulary is mostly taken from English, with some from German and some from French.
however, the words were distorted enough that any advantage this would give to the speakers
of those languages is all but negated.
it’s unlikely that any English speaker would figure out that “Volapük” comes from
the English words “world” and “speak” without it being pointed out to them.
this was actually intentional.
Schleyer knew that if he just used straight up English words for the whole thing without
changing anything about them, it would give English speakers an unfair advantage.
Volapük has seven singular pronouns: ob, ol, of, om, os, on, and ok. originally, they
roughly corresponded to I, you, she, he, it, you, and themself.
it’s a bit more complicated though.
first of all, “on”, which I translated as “you”, isn’t actually a second person pronoun.
it means “you” in the way you’d be using it if you said this sentence, where “you”
isn’t actually a specific person, but just like people in general.
people used to say “one” for this in English, but nowadays that’s mostly something one
does if one wants to sound more sophisticated than one actually is.
second of all, the way “om” and “os” mean “he” and “it” is kinda weird.
like, when you’re just talking about inanimate objects in the third person, you use “om”
because this is the eighteen hundreds so obviously men are default, women are abnormal, and other
genders don’t exist.
anyway, “os” is used whenever the subject is abstract, and isn’t actually a specific thing.
modern Volapük uses these pronouns differently.
essentially, the collective pronoun “on” is used as an epicene pronoun, and “om”
is only used in the masculine.
this is, for several hopefully obvious reasons, a much needed improvement.
all of these minor reforms, from the two extra letters to the pronoun overhaul, all had widely
varying degrees of succ ess, which resulted in several splits in the Volapük community,
which, alongside the overwhelming popularity of the then new fangled Esperanto, eventually
led to its downfall as a potential auxlang, dropping from nearly a million speakers to like twenty.
all in all, I’d say that although Volapük is important historically, and did accomplish
some noteworthy things, it’s not worth learning to speak.
its vowels are too numerous, its morphology is too precise, and its vocabulary is too Anglocentric.
that in mind, I’d say that I like Volapük more than I like aUI, but not as much as I
like Ygyde, making it the sixth best interlang reviewed so far.
thanks for watching, and I’ll see you next time, where I’ll be reviewing Dovahzul.
(robot voice) I suppose you think that's cute. What it makes you is a fraud.
hey everyone it’s me, jan Misali. at the end of episode twelve, I revealed the languages
that’ll be covered up to episode twenty four.
in case you haven’t seen that, the ones that are left are Dovahzul, Interlingua, Solresol,
Loglan, Zese, Futurese, Lingua Franca Nova, Interslavic, and Folkspraak.
none of the episodes after that are set in stone yet, but you can see my current plan
for the foreseeable future on the Big List by donating to my Patreon! it lists every
language anyone’s ever requested for me to review, and I’ve put them in an order
based on when they were first requested and how many times they’ve been requested.
as of the time I’m writing this, there are more episodes on the Big List than there are
words in Toki Pona! anyway, see ya.
(robot voice) yeah but I'm a cute fraud though right?