That some vedettes teased Volapukists was not so worrisome. After all, making fun of everybody and everything was their trade. More worrisome was the serious criticism coming from those who, no matter how slim the chances for the success of Volapuk might be, felt that its inroads in some circles was a troubling example of the malaise and decadence of French society. Was not Volapuk, with all its inflections and umlauted vowels, a broken Teutonic language? Now that the future of French was uncertain with the lost territories of Alsace and Lorraine, should French people give up and support a language invented by a German? Who was this so un- French sounding Kerckhoffs? Even if his reassurances about the limited ap- plication of Volapuk were sincere, wasn't he doing more harm than good? Could Volapuk ever rival the proverbial clarite, simplicite, and precision of Molieres language? As the physician and rabid anti-Volapukist, Jules-Michel Jasiewicz put it, should Volapuk ever succeed, Frenchmen
would be less inclined to study their language and, instead, they would teach their children these so-called useful languages! It is not difficult to understand that the day when the merchants and the industrialists will only need English or Volapuk, the French people will put aside the study of French, which will become useless for the scholars, the diplomats, etc. . . . This is all about the integrity of our patrimony, as well as the preponderance, at least the intellectual preponderance of the French language. . . . Why commit ourselves to our own effacement? Why should we contribute to our own moral and intellectual decline?5
German Volapukists came in for their share of mockery and ridicule as well. As the editor of Rund um die Welt complained: "It is not long ago that the word 'Volapuk' is sufficient to inspire ridicule and scorn when not, at best, a compassionate smile. The newspapers have made fun of this 'invention': they have pronounced a world language unnecessary and impossible, and their supporters complete fools."6
But worse than a token of foolishness, Volapuk was also perceived by some as a symptom of enfeebled patriotism, as was true in France. Although the victory in the Franco-Prussian war and the very creation of the German Reich had proved that the new country had the potential to rank among the great European powers, for Germany to realize this potential the unified state had to have its own lingua franca. This not only meant the standardization of Ger- man and its spelling—only accomplished in the early 1880s with the emer- gence of Binnen- or Reichsdeutsch, or Common Standard German—but also and more critically the Verdeutschung or Germanization of the recently seized territories of Alsace and Lorraine, the Sorbian-speaking communities of Bran- denburg and Saxony, and the Lithuanian- and Polish-speaking territories of East Prussia.7 For the most sensitive nationalists, more important than the Volap ukization of the world was the Germanization of Germany—two com- mitments apparently in conflict.
It did not help that Volapuks inventor was a Catholic priest, and that the language had mostly taken root in the Catholic regions of the country. Com- pared with that of the Lutherans, German Catholic loyalty toward the Reich was still questionable. Catholics were discriminated against in the new state. In the two decades preceding World War I, only eight of the ninety most se- nior positions of the Reich's civil administration were Catholics. There was only one Catholic in the Ministry of Finance, two in Education and Religious Affairs, and five in Foreign Affairs. The only Catholic in Internal Affairs was a messenger.8 Deutschtum was definitely closer to Luther than to Rome, and there was something suspicious about an employee of the pope with such a peculiar, un-German language.
The political arguments against Volapuk were occasionally quite explicit, as was true in Richard Hamel's book Die reaktionare Tendenz der weltsprachli- chen Bewegung (The reactionary bias of the international language movement). For Hamel, a journalist and literary critic, "the universal language is a re- curring deception of our mind, which falsely conceives of humanity as a sin- gle and all-encompassing organism." It was one more example of the "charlatanism" that goes against "the German language and culture." Hamel's dangerous diatribes had their response. But it was not Schleyer, a Catholic priest, who delivered it. Geography professor Alfred Kirchhoff, in his article "Is Volapuk antinational?" proceeded cautiously. While he agreed with Hamel's argument, positing that human progress has given way to human diversity, he contended that Volapuk did not try to reverse this progress. It was not trying to deter the independent evolution of different national char- acters and their corresponding languages. Rather, he reassured critics that Volapuk had "narrow practical goals." More important, since Volapuk was a
German invention, national pride demanded that Germans promote it. Oth- erwise, English, "which has sufficiently proved its excellent qualities, can tri- umph in the international context."9
Kirchhoff's and other Volapukists' patriotic responses, however, did not prevent further criticism. "Harlequin-like," "a fool's cap," "absurdity," "a fan- tastic caper," "young monster," "human-fleshed arrogance," "insipid," "profane importunity," "most unbelievable philistinism," and "total impotence" were some of the niceties that Dr. R5mer (a pseudonym) reserved for Schleyer's language in his Volapuk und Deutsche Professoren: Polemische Arabeske. Schleyer was for R5mer "a gawkish language idol" who had given birth to a dead language: dead because it had emerged "aus den Kirchhoff"—from the graveyard.10
If in France Volapuk was commended as a weapon against English and German, and in Germany as a weapon against English, did English speakers feel threatened? Not much, although this did not prevent some from criti- cizing the new language. This was true of Alexander Melville Bell, father of Alexander Graham Bell. Like Sprague, the leader of the American Volapukists, Bell had been very active in the spelling reform movement. But contrary to the former, Bell did not make the transition from spelling reform to advo- cacy of an artificial language. Volapuk, according to him, was too German, and unsuitable as an international language. Moreover, English was "itself reaching out toward universality, under the influence of commercial and so- cial necessities."11 For English to finally become the global language it was only necessary to remove some difficulties, particularly in its spelling, since "No laqgwij kŭd be inve'nted for inte^na'§ŭnal yŭ§ ^at wŭd supas iiĵgli§ in grama'tikal simpli'siti and in jenerel fitnes tŭ beku'm ^i tuq ov ^i wu]ld."12
Also, most linguists on both sides of the Atlantic opposed Volapŭk (as well as Esperanto and artificial languages yet to come), as they were trying to define their niche in the scientific division of labor and to obtain the re- spectability enjoyed by other scientists.
Basically, this meant the establishment of a research program that put aside philosophical speculations about the Adamic language and replicated the logic of discovery of the most advanced sciences. If astronomers had been able to discover the laws that govern the movements of the planets, and biologists the laws that determine the survival and extinction of species, then linguists could accomplish something similar if only they conceived of a language as a self-enclosed system governed by its own laws that can and must be discovered. This could be accomplished either by a comparative approach that illuminated the inherent regularities that pervade linguistic phenom- ena—in other words, through the field of linguistics—or, less systematically, by a descriptive approach on the historicity and evolution of languages, which was the specialty of philologists.