To facilitate scientific research and the transfer of knowledge, the Inter- national Bureau of Weights and Measures was established in 1875. The fields of pharmaceuticals, bibliographical systems, cartography, and technical draw- ing also established standardizing bodies.23 More than 300 international or- ganizations flourished in this period, and the number of international conferences escalated from a mere 20 in the 1850s to 1,062 in the first decade of the twentieth century.24
Talking about the current wave of globalization of the late 1990s, and in a bid to explain the ultimate success of English as the international language, David Crystal claims that "there [has] never been a time when so many na- tions were needing to talk to each other so much. There has never been a time when so many people wished to travel to so many places. There has never been such a strain placed on the conventional resources of translating and interpreting."25
But a quite similar scenario took place 100 years earlier during the sec- ond linguistic juncture, although with an important difference. Whereas now- adays there is a common understanding that English is the language of international communication, at the turn of the twentieth century the lin- guistic competition was still open. Although in the last third of the nineteenth century French was already losing ground to English, especially in trade and commerce, it had managed to retain its prestige as the language of diplomacy. In science, too, the linguistic balance was shifting and unstable. In the eigh- teenth century the Royal Academies of Berlin, Saint Petersburg, and Turin had adopted French as their official language, but by the late nineteenth cen- tury, German was poised to surpass it. In fact, by 1910, German was already
Q English
— fl- — German . . .
Spanish
+ French
Italian
Other
Figure 1. Hours of instruction in a foreign language as a percentage of all foreign language instruction in European secondary schools, 1908-1938. Source: Ulrich Ammon, "The European Union (EU—formerly European Community): Status Change of English During the Last Fifty Years," in Post-Imperial English: Status Change in Former British and American Colonies, 1940-1990, ed. Joshua Fishman, Andrew W. Conrad, and Alma Rubal-Lopez (Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter, 1996), 250.
the leading language in the natural sciences, a position that it retained for the next ten years.26 The international scenario from late nineteenth to the first decades of the twentieth century was diglossic—or, more accurately, tri- glossic, with French still holding a privileged position in diplomacy and in- ternational politics, English becoming ever more important in commerce, and German prevailing in science. Figure 1, which shows the percentages of for- eign language instructional hours in European secondary schools in the first decades of the twentieth century, illustrates the shifting fortunes of the main European languages.
This was an unstable international linguistic scene, and many believed that national rivalries would derail any international agreement to grant a national language the status of lingua franca.
This skepticism led some to think that a non-ethnic, artificial language could be the solution. As Herbert Spencer said, "It is quite possible . . . that the time will come when all existing languages will be recognized as so im- perfect, that an artificial language to be universally used will be agreed upon." Or, to quote from Nietzsche's Human, All Too Human: "In some far-off fu- ture time everyone will know a new language, a language of commerce at first, then a language of intellectual intercourse generally, and this as surely as there will one day be aerial navigation."27
But by this time languages had become something more important than pure communication tools. With language envisioned as a carrier of national identity, neither old nor aspiring nations could afford indifference to their "national" languages. Nationalist movements on the periphery of Western Europe, especially in the multinational Austro-Hungarian and Russian em- pires, drove linguists, literati, and political agitators to cooperate in language matters. Big nations strove to disseminate their national languages to strengthen their privileged position in the international arena, and reawak- ening nations such as the Basque, Occitan, Catalan, Czech, Rusyn, Lithua- nian, and Magyar endeavored to rediscover and reinvent their languages.28 Against this backdrop of tension between the more pressing need for a lingua franca boosted by globalization and the politicization of language, artificial language movements found their footing, in both linguistic and political terms. Either led by Johann Martin Schleyer, the inventor of Volap uk, or Ludwig Zamenhof, the creator of Esperanto, or Louis Couturat, the initiator of Ido, artificial language supporters were in no doubt that they had the key to the problem of international communication. But it was only Schleyer, a German Catholic priest, who hinted that his particul ar solution was inspired by none other than God.
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PART I
Volapuk
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CHAPTER2
A Language in Search of a Problem
On the night Johann Martin Schleyer was born in 1831, and as he later claimed as an omen to his remarkable life, a new volcanic island, Ferdinandea, emerged from the Mediterranean Sea. Strategically located between Sicily, Malta, and Tunisia, the island soon became the source of a political dispute, when the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies, France, Spain, and the United Kingdom claimed their sovereignty over it. Fortunately, in January of the next year, and before the dispute could turn into armed conflict, the forces of nature let the island sink. But this was not the only eventful night in Johann Martin Schleyer's life. Forty-eight years later, Schleyer, now a Catholic priest in the small town of Litzelstetten in southern Germany, had another extraordinary experience:
In a somehow mysterious and mystical way, in a dark night in the rectory of Litzelstetten, near Constance, in the corner room of the second floor overlooking the yard, while I was vividly reflecting on the follies, grievances, afflictions and woes of our time, the whole edifice of my international language suddenly appeared before my spiritual eyes in all its splendor. To pay tribute to the truth, and let her bear witness, I must say that on that night of March 1879, I was very tired; thus, I can only proclaim with all gratitude and humility that I owe to my good genius the whole system of the international language Volapuk. In March 31, 1879, I set up to compile and write down for the first time the principles of my grammar.1
The fourth of five children, Schleyer, the inventor of Volapuk, was born in Oberlauda, in northern Grand Duchy of Baden. His father was a school- teacher, as had been his grandfather and great-grandfather. Along with teaching, the priesthood was a vocational tradition on both sides of his fam- ily, and Schleyer took holy orders when he was twenty-five, apparently against his father's wishes, after spending three years at the University of Freiburg. At Freiburg, in addition to theology and classical languages, Schleyer pur- sued his interest in poetry and modern languages. Schleyer served as a vicar and in other subordinate positions in different locations for eleven years. He befriended the writer Alexander Kaufmann and his wife, Mathilde (aka Amara George), a Catholic poet. He corresponded with Countess Ida von Hahn-Hahn, also a relatively popular writer who had converted to Catholi- cism in middle age. In 1862 he was sent to Krumbach bei Messkirch, in southern Baden, where he published Catholic and patriotic verse, and built a reputation in literary circles. Shortly before the unification of Germany, he was given his own parish, and in 1875 he was sent to Litzelstetten, at that time a small village of 250 souls, and today a section of the city of Konstanz. In Litzelstetten, he published Sionsharfe, a periodical devoted to Catholic po- etry. Four years after his arrival, Schleyer had that mysterious and somewhat mystical experience in which he first conceived of the Volapuk language.2