aka a123 // 19th- and 20th-century interlinguistics is my most evil weapon. May also yap about other conlanging, Nintendo softmodding, and both at once. Mario Bros, DNI!
Icon: @atlantart
Website coming soon: https://pük.space/
Welcome to King Koopa's Konlang Kastle, where I take over Tumblr linguistics spaces with terrible takes and malicious misdeeds! Ask me whatever you want, but don't you dare ask anything stupid!
(I'm not actually an Altaicist. The username is an in-joke but then I got into the bit and it got out of hand. So now he's real and posting linguistics misinformation on my Tumblr and I have no choice but to watch. All hail the King)
Aside from general evildoing, my main interest is early auxiliary languages, particularly those created in the late 19th and early 20th century! I enjoy analyzing the often strange linguistic decisions made by these early conlangers, their obscurity and audience, and the history and (often problematic) legacy of this strange movement.
I am proficient in Esperanto and am currently learning Volapük (rigik, not nulik). I can slog through Ido and know a little bit of Toki Pona as well.
19th-20th century auxlang showcases:
Veltparl (1896) | 1 • 2 • 3
Nal Bino (1886) | COMING SOON
Miscellaneous paleo-auxlanging sidebars:
Cosmolangue (1893)
The 'best language' fallacy
Translations:
1888: Mostep Volapüka, section from January issue of Nunel valemik
As a follow-up to my ask-answer about typing diacritics in the early IALs, I found a good set of minimal pairs showing why replacing the Volapük ä ö ü with ae oe ue doesn't work:
kaen "technique, technicality" vs. kän "cannon"
toenik "ringing, resounding" vs. tönik "tenacious, tough"
pued "chastity" vs. püd "tranquility, peace"
How much an actual issue were diacritics in Esperanto, Volapük etc? Typewriters could just get accent keys over letters and handwriting is no issue, although the most common accent mark is the acute (á) used variously to indicate stress, vowel length or some tones
Short answer: not much of an issue, but not not an issue, either.
Long answer: Esperanto was typed primarily using French typewriters, which at the time were commonly used throughout Europe. They had a dead key for the circumflex that French speakers already used for their own vowels, so this was used for ĉ, ĝ, ĥ, ĵ, ŝ. Meanwhile, ŭ was either replaced with ù or simply written as u. Zamenhof recognized that these diacritics were still not accessible everywhere, and he recommended the use of the 'h-system' (ch, gh, hh, jh, sh) for the circumflexed consonants, using an apostrophe or dash to separate sh = ŝ from the consonant cluster sh.
Volapük, on the other hand, used only umlaut letters ä, ö, ü. Unlike in Esperanto, these could not be easily substituted for some other scheme - vowel clusters like ae, oe, ue did exist in Volapük, distinct from the umlaut letters. I'm not as certain on how much of a problem this was, but evidently the diaereses were readily available in English-speaking countries, from which came a majority of the more prominent Volapük gazettes (Kosmopolan in Gadi/Sydney, Nunel valemik in London, Gasedil mulik in Mushauwomuk/Boston). Some typewriters allowed users to switch between English and German typing.
Yet other languages with bespoke letters of their own had to take different approaches. It's hard to tell what exactly they would have done, but likely new or inverted type slugs had to be installed, which was not an easy process.
Fr. Schleyer himself was very critical of Esperanto's use of the circumflex, which he described in a scathing and racist 1895 pamphlet as "very ugly, bothering and Slavic." He even went on to write that Esperanto "clearly originated from Poland," compared to his own language, which by 'comparison' was "devised by a connoisseur of music, a composer and a poet."
Kiel kuriozaĵo, mi povas aldoni, ke mi persone manprenis Esperanto-leterojn el la antaŭa jarcento, eltajpitaj per skribmaŝinoj, kiuj evidente ne havis la bezonitajn klavojn; kaj mi vidis kiel oni poste aldonus la diakritilojn per krajono.
As a curious fact, I can add, that I have personally had through my hands letters in Esperanto from the past century, typed out by writing machines that clearly didn't have the needed keys; and I saw how they would add the diacritics with a pencil afterwards.
Ah jes, bonan aldonon! Mi ankaŭ vidis tiajn leterojn (sed ne manprenante!). Eĉ kelkaj malnovaj gramatikoj el la ‘80aj jaroj havis diakritajn signojn enmetitajn mane.
I was reading the earlier edition of the Nunel valemik from December 1888 since I was going to translate it, and I think there's something to be said for the gender imbalance of the people involved in the Volapük movement and the general auxlanging movement of the 19th century. And I don't just mean in an "oh it was just patriarchal that's just how it was" sort of way.
During the early days of Volapük's existence, one of the main commonly touted draws was its potential use for business communications - that is, being able to use a single, precise language that bridges ethnic and linguistic gaps and makes communicating across the world easy. While this was not necessarily Schleyer's own doing directly, he and other Volapük supporters had always sought to elevate Volapük's status in the world to equal modern natural languages, and using it in business was one way of doing that. The Volapük Commercial Correspondent (Spodel tedelik Volapüka) was popular among speakers when it came out in 1889, and there was also discussion of teaching the language at schools and higher learning institutions for the purposes of international communication.
In the late 19th century, this was overwhelmingly the prerogative of men. Many universities and apprenticeship programs explicitly barred women, and the kinds of jobs that did allow women and girls were grueling, dangerous, and/or required little communication with others. Meanwhile, middle-and upper-class women usually did not work, so it was men who had far more incentive to learn the language. So, women, while nominally allowed within the movement, were in practice largely excluded from any benefits it could have provided and were not in most public-facing roles promoting the language.
The result is similar to the result of a lot of misogyny: a bunch of men doing most of the more publicly visible work and getting the credit, because that's the demographic Volapük would have appealed to the most - white, straight, middle-class men who talk to other white, straight, middle-class men.
This text, from the very same section of the very same periodical from just a month later, proudly reported that "numerous" (Vp. lemödik) women were in attendance at a large gathering of Volapük speakers in Hamburg, Germany on November 23rd, 1888. How many of the nearly four hundred attendees can we guess were women? How many women is lemödik? 10? 20? 100?
Latainülpük binom pük löpefik Kooparegäna Latainalik. Ye önedans lesteifoms kosiadön aeti demü kod selednik sembal, also Volapük - kel, as sevols, binom väpük papüköl fa telions daü vol - omutom sätön
ANNOUNCEMENT:
Proto-Altaic is the official language of the Altaicist Koopa Kingdom. However, the minions are having trouble putting that one together for some odd reason, so Volapük - which, as you know, is a world language spoken by billions throughout the world - will have to do
I agree largely with JBR’s suggestions for Inventory although I would swap out <ny> for <z> due to loans from Arabic, English, French etc. and because per Maddieson more languages have 3 nasals than 4. I also have letter names - a mix of Greek, Arabic and others as would be appropriate at the time hypothetically
'Alif- /?/
alfa-/a/
beta- /b/
che- /tš/
delta - /d/
epsilon- /e/
fi - /f/
gama- /g/
ha - /h/
iota- /i/
Jim - /dž/
kapa-/k/
landa-/l/
mem- /m/
nu - /n/
eng- /ň/
omikron-/o/
pe- /p/
ro- /r/
sigma -/s/
shin - /š/
tau-/t/
udan-/u/, /w/
ya - /j/
zeta - /z/
Cool! If you have any other ideas I'd be glad to hear them in DMs
Idea: an auxlang that gains naturalistic complexity and irregularity over time e.g orthography
to fit Latinate and non-Latinate terms recognizably, respectively
/k/ before /a,o,u/ - <c> - <k> e.g <carbon> , <kalif>
/kw/ - <qu> - <ku> e.g <quiet>, <Kuang>
/ks/ - <x> - <ks> e.g <exam>, <Ksatriya>
and for Latin/Indic vs others
/w/ - <v> - <w> e.g <serva>, <wangchau>
Have you heard of Viossa? It's a communal auxiliary pidgin language that's meant to emulate the way natural pidgin languages evolve over time. Could be worth checking out.
How could Esperanto be used by the LoN? In airport signs?
Assuming you mean the League of Nations, which only existed from 1920 to 1946? They could have done that, probably, but I don’t think it would have helped their case much beyond a symbolic level. They already had working languages that were much more commonly spoken.
Have you ever read about the "spontaneous" Esperanto spoken in Interhelpo? It incorporated Italian, French, German, Yiddish, English, Czech, Slovak, Hungarian, Russian, Kyrgyz, Uzbek, Ukrainian, Tajik and Tartar loans into it! And it was spoken next to Ido :D
I have not, I’ll look into this! Very fascinating!
as early as 1921, Sapir noted the major sources of languages in the world were Latin, Arabic, Sanskrit and Midieval Chinese, and Modern Chinese-English and Hindi-English grammars were available as early as the early 19th century - yet Eurocentrism. Honestly even a Europe-Middle East-India-China-centrism of the “Great Civilizations” sense that Toynbee wrote in would have been inclusive albeit dated
Honestly, “Eurocentric” doesn’t even fully describe how narrow their scope was.
Almost all early auxlangers that used a posteriori roots excluded Russian and other Slavic roots from their lexicon, and Louis Couturat and Léopold Leau in 1903 even went as far as to write that “...it remains true that the international language, to be truly international, must be a Romano-Germanic language,” and yet others, such as Léon Bollack (inventor of La Langue Bleue in 1899), explicitly geared their so-called international languages toward the heritage of so-called “Aryan peoples,” to the exclusion of all others. So many were worse than Eurocentric—they were outright white supremacist.
Many conlangers of the day also specifically ignored Germanic (often called “Teutonic”) elements as well. Some openly disliked its compound nouns, its apparent dissimilarities with other languages of western Europe, and its supposedly harsh sound. The result was that Romance “international” languages were a dime a dozen, none of them particularly distinct from each other in any interesting way.
Ironically, the two most popular auxlangs in the entire 19th century were created by a German and a Pole!
If you want further reading, I will once again plug Johanna Pink’s excellent analysis of a partial translation of the Holy Qur’an into Volapük that Fr. Schleyer completed in 1890, which contextualizes just how parochial the language’s intellectual reach was.
How much an actual issue were diacritics in Esperanto, Volapük etc? Typewriters could just get accent keys over letters and handwriting is no issue, although the most common accent mark is the acute (á) used variously to indicate stress, vowel length or some tones
Short answer: not much of an issue, but not not an issue, either.
Long answer: Esperanto was typed primarily using French typewriters, which at the time were commonly used throughout Europe. They had a dead key for the circumflex that French speakers already used for their own vowels, so this was used for ĉ, ĝ, ĥ, ĵ, ŝ. Meanwhile, ŭ was either replaced with ù or simply written as u. Zamenhof recognized that these diacritics were still not accessible everywhere, and he recommended the use of the 'h-system' (ch, gh, hh, jh, sh) for the circumflexed consonants, using an apostrophe or dash to separate sh = ŝ from the consonant cluster sh.
Volapük, on the other hand, used only umlaut letters ä, ö, ü. Unlike in Esperanto, these could not be easily substituted for some other scheme - vowel clusters like ae, oe, ue did exist in Volapük, distinct from the umlaut letters. I'm not as certain on how much of a problem this was, but evidently the diaereses were readily available in English-speaking countries, from which came a majority of the more prominent Volapük gazettes (Kosmopolan in Gadi/Sydney, Nunel valemik in London, Gasedil mulik in Mushauwomuk/Boston). Some typewriters allowed users to switch between English and German typing.
Yet other languages with bespoke letters of their own had to take different approaches. It's hard to tell what exactly they would have done, but likely new or inverted type slugs had to be installed, which was not an easy process.
Fr. Schleyer himself was very critical of Esperanto's use of the circumflex, which he described in a scathing and racist 1895 pamphlet as "very ugly, bothering and Slavic." He even went on to write that Esperanto "clearly originated from Poland," compared to his own language, which by 'comparison' was "devised by a connoisseur of music, a composer and a poet."
Section from Nunel Valemik ("Universal Messenger"), 1889
This is a section called 'The Progress of Volapük' in a Volapük-language gazette published in London, this issue dated January 1, 1889. It details a report of some of the advancements Volapük has (supposedly) made in Britain and beyond.
What a cool glimpse into how Volapük was doing at a time where it was in the midst of schisms and disagreements, and the things people were doing to keep the language alive while Esperanto was starting to spread. I sometimes like to think of the Volapük community (and the auxlanging community of the time at large) as a sort of countercultural community in its own right.
There is an error near the end of the fourth paragraph in the form of *kökoms "meetings/conventions," which has the diaeresis on the wrong vowel. It's spelled correctly in the singular as koköm in the very next sentence.
Translation below the cut!
ON NOVEMBER 23rd, the Hamburg Volapük Club celebrated its “second anniversary” with an excellent exhibition of Volapük literature, etc. The exhibition was similar to the one in Leipzig. Here one could see books and booklets that have been published in and about Volapük, a pamphlet from Dr. Mies about skulls, etc. The evening’s program contained discourses by Dr. Böger and other gentlemen, and some songs. In the conference hall nearly four hundred people were present, among whom one could see numerous ladies.
On November 11th, the Konstanz Volapük Club celebrated, in the Klein Venedig room, the “name day” of the creator of Vp. Johann Martin Schleyer. In the room, which was too small for the number of attendees, one could see a portrait of the creator amidst a bouquet. The entire room was decorated beautifully, and the creator was greeted with a resounding Volapük hymn when he entered. Director Delisle greeted the creator with a beautiful speech in which he expressed the joy of Volapükans at Mr. Schleyer’s return to health. Ms. Weiler spoke a congratulatory poem; then Mr. Stierle followed with a commemorative discourse and finished with an appropriate toast. Mr. Schleyer, having given thanks, spoke about the propagation of Volapük. Songs, declamations, and merry diversions followed, and the participants departed quite content.
In Torino, “Manual of stenography according to the Gabelsberger system, applied to Vp.” has been published by Oreglia d’Isola, priced 2.80 francs. The application of Gabelsberger’s system to our universal language is an important event, and we hope that Mr. Oreglia d’Isola’s experiment will be received favorably.
In England, Vp. is progressing gradually. Mr. M. Uhland spoke three times about Vp. in Manchester and in Liverpool with consequential results. —Mr. Day spoke on November 20th in Blackheath (London) in front of 150 people, ladies and gentlemen alike, who followed the words of the discussion with great attention. Articles about Vp., by Mr. Day, were published in the new weekly paper of London. —Vp. lost two friends lately: Mr. Dornbusch, about whom we have written elsewhere; and Colonel Duncan, M.P. Although Colonel Duncan was not a Volapükan, the creation of Mr. Schleyer interested him greatly. —In Hull, the members of the Volapük club elected its president (Mr. R.H.B. Nicholson), its vice-presidents (among them Dr. Krause), and some officers. Meetings occur weekly on Thursday in the “Royal Institution;” an afternoon meeting for the ladies, and an evening meeting for everyone. On the occasion of the first meeting the club had instituted an exposition of Volapük literature. —On December 10th, Mr. F.B. Cato spoke about Vp. in Bishopstoke with a good result. —New clubs have been founded in Hanover, Königsberg, Milano, Bay City (U.S.A.), Köln, Curitiba (Brazil), Beirut, etc.
We learn with great enjoyment that, following a demand expressed by an Italian Volapük club, the minister of public education gave to it a license to inaugurate a course of Volapük near Royal Technical High School in Torino. This permission is very important for the progress of Volapük in Italy, and we applaud the aforementioned club for this delightful result.
What bought you into interlinguistics? JBR had a criticism of Esperanto
It started when I learned about Esperanto and Toki Pona during high school, and I became fascinated with the idea of people creating languages - these were also my own first forays into conlanging. (I've been doing it for six or so years now... time flies!) Really, auxlangs were not really an interest of mine until about a year or so ago. At that point, I dove more into Volapük, which was my natural next step as the most popular auxlang of its pre-Esperanto time, and that led me to look into the dozens and dozens of other attempts created by the nascent auxlanging community.
I've read JBR's Ranto, and it's got a lot of good points. Some are subjective, but really, the thing it proves best is that bespoke IALs, no matter how well-constructed, just aren't really viable even in the modern day, and that's part of why my interest is much more focused on the history. The area around the late 19th and (to a lesser extent) early 20th centuries is especially interesting to me. It's such a fascinating glimpse into the minds of some of the earliest conlangers to ever publish their work, and it's very cool to engage with that history.
Think how far we've come - one hundred years ago the conlang community of the time was largely exclusionary, racist, sexist, and generally bigoted in almost every way. Now, the conlanging communities I've been in have been some of the most diverse and queer-friendly spaces ever!
Speaking of auxlangs, I once had a fictional one invented in the 19th century Spanish Philippines in a no-American Revolution timeline that combined Latin, Arabic, Sanskrit and Chinese - all of which influenced Tagalog, and became the basis of an auxlang analogue to Zionism in Hawaii
What an interesting concept, thanks for sharing! I’d love to hear more about it!
