Volapük is a constructed language. Its ISO 639 language codes are vo and vol. This image is the site logo used on the English Wikipedia, the Wiki. ... Wikipedia is a Web-based, free-content encyclopedia that is written collaboratively by volunteers. ... An artificial or constructed language (known colloquially as a conlang among aficionados), is a language whose vocabulary and grammar are specifically devised by an individual or small group, rather than having naturally evolved as part of a culture as with natural languages. ... ISO 639 is one of several international standards that lists short codes for language names. ...

Volapük was created in 1879-1880 by Johann Martin Schleyer, a Catholic priest in Baden, Germany. Schleyer felt that God had told him in a dream to create an international language. Volapük conventions took place in 1884 (Friedrichshafen), 1887 (Munich), and 1889 (Paris). The first two conventions used German, and the last conference used only Volapük. As of 1889, there were an estimated 283 clubs, 25 periodicals in or about Volapük, and 316 textbooks in 25 languages. 1879 was a common year starting on Wednesday (see link for calendar). ... 1880 was a leap year starting on Thursday (see link for calendar). ... Johann Martin Schleyer (July 18, 1831 - August 16, 1921), German Catholic priest who invented the constructed language Volapük. ... This article is about the sacrament. ... Baden was a territory in the southwest of what later became unified Germany. ... The term God is ordinarily used to designate a singular, universal Supreme Being. ... Dreaming is the subjective experience of imaginary images, sounds/voices, words, thoughts or sensations during sleep, usually involuntarily. ... An international auxiliary language (sometimes abbreviated as IAL or auxlang) is a language used (or to be used in the future) for communication between people from different nations who do not share a common native language. ... Generally, convention means coming together. ... 1884 is a leap year starting on Tuesday (click on link to calendar). ... 1887 is a common year starting on Saturday (click on link for calendar). ... 1889 was a common year starting on Tuesday (see link for calendar). ...

Grammar

Schleyer adapted the vocabulary mostly from English, with a smattering of German and French, and often modified it beyond easy recognizability. For instance, "vol" and "pük" are derived from the English words "world" and "speak". Although unimportant linguistically, these deformations were greatly mocked by the language's detractors. A vocabulary is a set of words known to a person or other entity, or that are part of a specific language. ... The English language is a West Germanic language that originates in England. ...

The grammar is roughly based on that of Indo-European languages but with a regularized agglutinative character: grammatical features are indicated by putting together unchanging elements, rather than shifting, multi-meaning inflections. Grammar is the study of the rules governing the use of a language. ... Proto-Indo-European Indo-European studies Indo-European is originally a linguistic term, referring to the Indo-European language family. ... An agglutinative language is a language in which the words are formed by joining morphemes together. ... This article is about inflection in linguistics. ...

As in German, the Volapük noun has four cases: nominative, genitive, dative, and accusative. In compound words, the first part of the compound is usually separated from the second by the genitive termination "-a", e.g. Vola-pük, "of-world language". However, the other case endings (-e dative, -i accusative) are sometimes used, or the roots may be agglutinated in the nominative, with no separating vowel. A noun, or noun substantive, is a word or phrase that refers to a person, place, thing, event, substance or quality. ... The nominative case is a grammatical case for a noun. ... The genitive case is a grammatical case that indicates a relationship, primarily one of possession, between the noun in the genitive case and another noun. ... The dative case is a grammatical case for nouns and/or pronouns. ... The accusative case of a noun is, generally, the case used to mark the direct object of a verb. ...

Adjectives, formed by the suffix "-ik", normally follow the noun they modify. They do not agree with the noun in number and case unless they precede the noun or stand alone. Adverbs are formed by suffixing "-o" to the adjectival "-ik"; they normally follow the verb or adjective they modify. An adjective is a part of speech which modifies a noun, usually making its meaning more specific. ... An adverb is a part of speech that normally serves to modify verbs, adjectives, other adverbs, clauses, and sentences. ...

The verb carries a fine degree of detail, with morphemes marking tense, aspect, voice, person, number, and (in the third person) the subject's gender. However, many of these categories are optional, and a verb can stand in an unmarked state. (It has been claimed that the full conjugation of a verb in Volapük can involve 500,000 forms.) A verb is a part of speech that usually denotes action (bring, read), occurrence (to decompose (itself), to glitter), or a state of being (exist, live, soak, stand). Depending on the language, a verb may vary in form according to many factors, possibly including its tense, aspect, mood and voice. ... In Linguistics, a morpheme is the smallest meaningful unit in a given language. ... Grammatical tense is a way languages express the time at which an event described by a sentence occurs. ... In linguistics, grammatical aspect is a property of a verb that defines the nature of temporal flow (or lack thereof) in the described event or state. ... In grammar, voice is the relationship between the action or state expressed by a verb, and its arguments (subject, object, etc. ... Grammatical person, in linguistics, is deictic reference to the participant role of a referent, such as the speaker, the addressee, and others. ... In linguistics, number is a grammatical category that specifies the quantity of a noun or affects the form of a verb or other part of speech depending on the quantity of the noun to which it refers. ... In linguistics, grammatical genders, also called noun classes, are classes of nouns reflected in the behavior of associated words; every noun must belong to one of the classes and there should be very few which belong to several classes at once (Hockett 1958: 231). ... In linguistics, grammatical conjugation is the creation of derived forms of a verb from the word root by inflection (regular alteration according to rules of grammar). ...

Not only verbs, adjectives and adverbs, but prepositions, conjunctions and interjections can be formed from noun roots by appending appropriate suffixes.

Earlier versions of Volapük added vowels from blackletter typefaces to the antiqua ones. Later versions replaced them with the Roman vowels with diaereses added. Fig. ... In typography, a typeface is a co-ordinated set of character designs, which usually comprises an alphabet of letters, a set of numerals and a set of punctuation marks. ... Antiqua describes a form of typeface in which the lines in letters are not broken up. ... In linguistics, a diaeresis or dieresis (AE) (from Greek diairein, to divide) is the modification of a syllable by distinctly pronouncing one of its vowels. ...

History

Schleyer first published a sketch of Volapük in May 1879 in Sionsharfe, a Catholic magazine of which he was editor. This was followed in 1880 by a full-length book in German. Schleyer himself did not write books on Volapük in other languages, but other authors soon did.

The Flemish cryptographer Dr. Auguste Kerckhoffs was for a number of years Director of the Academy of Volapük, and introduced the movement to several countries. However tensions arose between Dr. Kerckhoffs and others in the Academy, who wanted reforms in the language, and Schleyer, who insisted strongly on retaining his proprietary rights. This led to schism, with much of the Academy abandoning Schleyer's Volapük in favor of Idiom Neutral and other new constructed language projects. Another reason for the decline of Volapük may have been the rise of Esperanto. In 1887, the first Esperanto book (Unua Libro) was published. As the language was easier to learn, many Volapük clubs became Esperanto clubs. This is a disambiguation page — a navigational aid which lists other pages that might otherwise share the same title. ... Pre-19th century Leone Battista Alberti, polymath/universal genius, inventor of polyalphabetic substitution (see frequency analysis for the significance of this -- missed by most for a long time and dumbed down in the Vigenère cipher), and what may have been the first mechanical encryption aid. ... Dr Auguste Kerckhoffs (19 January 1835 _ 1903) was a Flemish linguist and cryptographer who was professor of languages at the School of Higher Commercial Studies in Paris in the late 19th century. ... Idiom Neutral is an international auxiliary language, published in 1902 by the International Academy of the Universal Language (Akademi Internasional de Lingu Universal) under the leadership of Waldemar Rosenberger, a St. ... Esperanto flag Esperanto is a constructed international language. ... The Unua Libro (First Book) was the first publication to describe the international language, Esperanto (then called Lingvo Internacia, inter-national language). It was first published in Russian on July 26, 1887, and later editions were published in Russian, 1888, Hebrew, 1889. ...

In the 1920s Arie de Jong, with the consent of the leaders of the small remnant of Volapük speakers, made a revision of Volapük which was published in 1931. This revision was accepted by the few speakers of the language. de Jong simplified the grammar, eliminating some rarely-used verb forms, and eliminated some perceived sexism in the pronouns and gendered verb endings. He also added the phoneme "r" and used it to make some morphemes more recognizable. For instance, "lömib" (rain) became "rein". Arie de Jong (1865-1957), Dutch reformer of the constructed language Volapük. ... Sexism is discrimination against people based on their sex rather than their individual merits. ... In spoken language, a phoneme is a basic, theoretical unit of sound that can distinguish words (i. ...

Volapük enjoyed a brief renewal of popularity in the Netherlands and Germany under de Jong's leadership, but was suppressed (along with Esperanto and other constructed languages) in countries under Nazi rule and never recovered.

There are an estimated 25-30 Volapük speakers in the world today.

Large Volapük collections are held by the International Esperanto Museum[1] (http://www.onb.ac.at/sammlungen/plansprachen/eo/index.htm) in Vienna, Austria; the Centre de documentation et d'étude sur la langue internationale in La Chaux-de-Fonds, Switzerland; and the American Philosophical Society in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. [2] (http://www.amphilsoc.org/library/mole/v/volapuk.htm) Vienna (German: Wien [viːn]) is the capital of Austria, and also one of Austrias nine federal states (Bundesland Wien). ... The American Philosophical Society, founded in 1743 by Benjamin Franklin, continues to operate to this day. ... Independence Hall Philadelphia (sometimes referred to as Philly or the City of Brotherly Love) is the fifth-most-populous city in the United States and the most populous city in the state of Pennsylvania, occupying all of Philadelphia County. ...

Example

An example of Volapük is the translation of the Lord's Prayer: The Lords Prayer (sometimes known by its first two Latin words as the Pater Noster, in Greek as the , or the English equivalent Our Father) is probably the best-known prayer in Christianity. ...

 O Fat obas, kel binol in süls, paisaludomöz nem ola! Kömomöd monargän ola! Jenomöz vil olik, äs in sül, i su tal! Bodi obsik vädeliki govolös obes adelo! E pardolös obes debis obsik, äs id obs aipardobs debeles obas. E no obis nindukolös in tendadi; sod aidalivolös obis de bas. Jenosöd! 

External links

• Vükiped (http://vo.wikipedia.org/), The Volapük Wikipedia
• Handbook of Volapük (http://personal.southern.edu/~caviness/Volapuk/HBoV/), Charles E. Sprague (1888)
• A ten-lesson course (http://personal.southern.edu/~caviness/Volapuk/VolVifik/volvif00.html) in modern Volapük
• Volapük links page (http://personal.southern.edu/~caviness/Volapuk/)
• An article on the 1931 revision (http://www.rick.harrison.net/langlab/dejong.html)
• Article on Volapük from the 1911 Encyclopaedia Britannica (http://68.1911encyclopedia.org/V/VO/VOLAPUK.htm)
• Volapük bibliography (http://member.netease.com/~htliu/biblio.html#chap2)
• Volapükalised (http://www.yahoogroups.com/group/volapuk) - A Volapük group on Yahoo, general discussion in Volapük about any topic and about Volapük in various other languages
• Vödasbukalised (http://www.yahoogroups.com/group/voydasbuk) - Volapük terminology group on Yahoo
• Glup ICQ Volapükik (http://web.icq.com/groups/group_details?gid=11998108)