Bridge of Words

The late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries saw the rise of nationalist language movements in Italy, Hungary, and Poland. Such projects inspired Zamenhof's sense that language could be assigned a moral mission, though, as Garv^a has noted, his interethnic purpose was diametrically opposed to nationalism.⁸ In fact, proponents of these movements of national revival viewed the notion of an international language with suspicion and distaste. As the Italian poet Giacomo Leopardi (1798-1837) put it, a universal language would be "the most enslaved, impoverished, timid, monotonous, uniform, arid and ugly language ever ... incapable of beauty of any type, totally uncongenial to imagination."⁹ In France, Antoine Destutt de Tracy (1754-1836) warned against the desire for a universal language, conjuring a jejune, homogeneous intellectual life centered on an ossified authority.¹⁰ Behind all these misgivings is the menacing specter of a universal language driven by the exigencies of imperial power.

By the middle decades of the nineteenth century, Napoleon's imperial adventure, having laid new networks of communication and transportation, had given rise to new international bodies and protocols for international trade and research. The Encyclopedistes' efforts to make language more effective and efficient now took root in France and spread to Germany, Scandinavia, and Italy. Not since the seventeenth century had so much time and energy been spent on language building. The first scholarly study of invented languages, published in Paris in 1903, surveys thirty-eight projects, almost all of them a posteriori "improvements" on existing European languages.

In the spring of 1879, a night of insomnia gave rise to Volapuk, the first invented language to capture the imagination of thousands; perhaps tens of thousands. Volapuk's inventor, a German Catholic priest named Johann Martin Schleyer (1831-1912), claimed he'd received the language in a vision from God. Schleyer's claim notwithstanding, the design of Volapuk was anything but divine; in fact, designed for and embraced by an elite, it was effete, feeble, and very difficult to master. The first problem was phonetic. Aiming for a universally pronounceable alphabet, Schleyer changed the letter r to l, ostensibly to benefit the Chinese, yet it soon emerged that Japanese speakers had problems pronouncing l. Deformations of familiar phonemes soon became fodder for satire. In 1887, a skeptical commentator for the New York Tim.es wrote:

It may startle the reader ... to learn that he is a melopel [American] who is perusing his morning pop [paper] unaware of the true state of his case.. He may have come across the Atlantic from Yulop [Europe] or have smuggled himself and his pigtail into California after a month's voyage from Sinan [China].. In any case, his daduk [education] is sure to be incomplete, since he is not proficient in Volapuk.¹¹

But Schleyer's phonetics were only one problem; another was that his words were inflected with a myriad of endings. With its endlessly morphing verbs, whose endings indicated tense (including six conditional tenses), number, mood, voice, and sometimes gender, Volapuk entered the realm of absurdity. That a single verb might take 505,440 different forms¹² became, for Volapuk's detractors, proof of its lunacy. As the late Donald Harlow, former president of the Esperanto League of North America, once put it, the problem with Volapuk was that it had "more verb forms than speakers."¹³

Johann Schleyer, the inventor of Volapuk [Osterreichische Nationalbibliothek]

As Garv^a has shown, Volapuk clubs sprang up within a narrow demographic of male, educated, German-speaking Catholics, and its membership never diversified.¹⁴ Attaining any fluency in the language seems to have been optional; German, not Volapuk, was the lingua franca of the congresses of 1884 and 1887. Within a decade of its inception, the movement foundered while Schleyer bickered with reformists in his ersatz academy, contesting the notion that Volapuk might be used in commercial settings.¹⁵ The dissonance between Schleyer's account of passively receiving the language from God and his harshly proprietary behavior did not go unremarked. In 1907, the historian W. J. Clark mused on the debacle as a "vexed question of paternity": "This child ... was it a son domiciled in its father's house...? Or a ward in the guardianship of its chief promoters? Or an orphan foundling, to be boarded out on the scattered-home system at the public expense?"¹⁶

5. Lingvo Internacia