His international language project did not proceed straightforwardly. First he developed an international phonetic alphabet that allowed words in every language to be phonetically transliterated and understood by both na- tive and non-native speakers. This alphabet would prevent German people from writing "Eiaua," as it would look if it were a German word, when they wanted to send a letter to Iowa. If they could not spell "Iowa" in English, they could use the new international alphabet and write "Aioua" instead. He was hopeful that the Universal Postal Union would adopt his "world alphabet," and to this end submitted his manuscript to the German postal administra- tion. In 1878, the Universal Postal Union kindly published his proposal in its official journal, but that was the end of the story.
His idea of a world alphabet probably derived from the different spelling reform projects afloat in Germany at the time. Recently unified, the new coun- try needed a unified spelling, and different proposals were discussed. A compromise was reached in 1876, but it did not satisfy many, including Schleyer, who favored a more phonetic German spelling. Schleyer liked to use his homemade German spelling system in his publications.
But Schleyer's international phonetic alphabet went a step further: it was not intended to be applied to German or any other national language, but focused instead on how the same sounds could be represented in all lan- guages.3 What he had, then, was a new alphabet, but not a unique language upon which this alphabet could be tested, so it was only logical for him to create such a language. This was the idea that seized his mind on that mem- orable and sleepless night of March 31, 1879, when the entire scaffolding of Volapuk took shape.4
Apparently, Schleyer began to construct his Volapuk with the grammar. Like German, Volapuk had four cases: nominative, accusative, dative, and genitive, which were denoted by the vowels at the end of words. Vowels could also be used to form compound words, such as Volapuk (vol from "world," a for the genitive case, and puk from "speak"), meaning "the language of the world." Regarding verbal forms, there was only one conjugation. Specific par- ticles at the end or beginning of the infinitive indicated tense, person, and voice. If lof meant "love," for example, lofob, alofob, elofob, ilofob, olofob, and ulofob meant "I love," "I loved," "I have loved," "I had loved," "I will love," and "I will have loved," respectively. Since prefixes and suffixes were used to denote grammatical functions, root words had to be easily identified in the final shape of constructed words. To allow for this, Schleyer decided that root words should begin and finish with a consonant, so that prefixes ended and suffixes began with a vowel. Given that root words had to begin and end with a consonant, and that the alphabet had only nineteen consonants and eight vowels (a, a, e, i, o, 5, u, u), coining a word often posed a combinatorial chal- lenge, which became more constraining with two additional rules: that words had to be short, and preferably derived from English. Thus puk (from "speak") was chosen because there was already a pik word. Beatik binoms, kels klodoms, for example, means "Blessed are those who believe."5
Schleyer did not create an international language in order to solve communication problems; he just came around to such a language almost through revelation, as a complement to his queries in phonetic spelling. To Schleyer, Volapuk was not a solution to a problem; it was a solution in search of a problem.
More a man of belles lettres than science and philosophy, Schleyer knew nothing about the artificial languages of the seventeenth century when he cre- ated his language. Nor did he care much about them, or feel compelled to examine them when told about their existence. More concerned with remain- ing original, he was convinced he had done better than Wilkins, Dalgarno, and company.6
He had good reasons to feel this way. Escaping the oblivion to which its dozens of predecessors had been consigned, Volapuk was the first artificial language to obtain wide recognition from an interested public, gather a community of committed speakers, and have its own international social movement.
And all of this was accomplished rather quickly. Only nine years after pub- lication of the first scheme of the language in Sionsharfe, there were 15 Volapuk journals and 257 clubs around the world, from Europe to America, and from China to Australia. These clubs offered language courses, organized official exams and, more important, promoted the language locally. In some Euro- pean countries, the language was also taught in public schools, business schools, and universities, and a new profession, Volapukatidel, or teacher of Volapuk, was created. Schleyer, the priest of a tiny village in southern Ger- many, became an international celebrity.7
Schleyer had not focused energetically on potential uses or users, but once he invented the language, the users found Volapuk, and him.
CHAPTER 3
Who Were the Volapukists?
The first Volapukists were the readers and collaborators of his Catholic po- etry journal Sionsharfe, where Schleyer published a first draft of his language, mostly southern German Catholics interested in poetry.! In his first separate brochure on Volapuk, Schleyer explained its grammar and vocabulary and established the organizational imprint of the Volapukist movement. This bro- chure included an invitation to send a short text in the new language to ob- tain a certificate or diploma that automatically granted membership in the movement. The bylaws of the movement, included in the official diploma, clearly indicated that it was not his intention to govern the movement in ac- cordance with democratic principles. Article 7 stated that its "supreme leader" was himself, and Articles 16 and 17 provided that decisions reached by ma- jority vote required that the supreme leader also voted with the majority.2
In its first years, and much to Schleyer's surprise, the movement gained strength quite rapidly. By 1883, Schleyer's textbook, already in its fourth edi- tion, had been translated into ten languages. Volapukist clubs sprang up in Germany, the Netherlands, Sweden, and Austria, and in addition to the of- ficial Weltsprache-Volap ukabled journal, founded by Schleyer in 1880, two other Volapukist periodicals emerged in Breslau and Rotterdam. Volapuk en- thusiasts in Germany and abroad organized public conferences in educational and professional settings, and by May 1884, seven general assemblies, mostly gathering German adherents, had taken place.
The Volapukist press usually included names and addresses of people who supported the movement and wanted to correspond with other Volapukists to practice the language. A combined file with the names, addresses, and oc- casionally the occupation of a total of 1,709 Volapukists, included in the French 1887 Volapuk yearbook, the Volapuk almanac of 1888, and the pages of the Vienna-based journal Rund um die Welt (1889-1892), gives us an ap- proximate picture of the movement membership.
To begin with, Volapuk was a male-dominated movement. Women were only 10 to 15 percent of Volapukists, a rather low percentage compared with that of the Esperantists, as we will see in later chapters. Most of these women were either related to a male Volapukist or trained as teachers.
One-third of Volapukists were German, mostly concentrated in the Cath- olic regions of southern Germany and western Prussia. Austrian Volapukists were the second-largest group, with 12 percent of total membership, followed by the Dutch (9.5 percent), the French (9 percent), and the Belgians, mostly in the Flanders region (7 percent). Although information about the profes- sional and social status of members is very limited (only a third of them said something about their profession), Ph.D.s were overrepresented when com- pared with the average population. Around one-tenth of the Volapukists who reported their occupation had a doctorate. Middle-class professionals, such as public employees, teachers, bookkeepers, and typographers, also abounded. The combined file includes nineteen priests and a similar number of merchants and manufacturers. The average Volapukist was male, Catholic, German- speaking, and an upper-middle-class professional. It seems that the brief history of the movement did not allow for a diversification of its member- ship, which corresponds very closely to the original characteristics of the first-comers: Catholics and German speakers. For example, the small Volapuk club of Saint Petersburg was mainly composed of German immigrants,3 and among the American Volapukists, German names were not uncommon—in fact, one of them, the librarian Klaus A. Linderfelt, was the author of the first Volapuk handbook published in the United States.