Off topic: Parlez-vous volapuk? :~) Thread poster: Rad Graban (X)
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Rad Graban (X) 
United Kingdom
Local time: 17:12
English to Slovak
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| Brian Young
United States
Local time: 10:12
Danish to English
This is very interesting. The term has been used in Denmark for as long as I can remember, at least since 1964, and probably long before. It of course means "nonsense"-
"Det lyder som det rene volapuk". I had no idea that it was used in other languages. I have never heard it in English.
So, now I know!
Thanks
| | | | pcovs
Denmark
Local time: 18:12
English to Danish
With Brian.
We use it in Denmark still - no idea when it started, and yes it means to speak gibberish or something.
Perhaps Sarkozy has read an old book recently or had the company of a Dane?
| | | | mediamatrix (X)
Local time: 14:12
Spanish to English
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| Learn about it before knocking it! | Mar 11, 2010 |
Reproduced here for pseudo-academic purposes from "The Loom of Language", Frederick Bodmer, George Allen & Unwin Ltd. (First edition, 1941):
VOLAPUK
The first constructed language which human beings actually spoke, read, wrote, and printed was Volapuk (1880). Its inventor was Johann Martin Schleyer, a German catholic priest, zealous alike in the cause of world-trade and universal brotherhood. Hence his motto: Menade bal puki bal (For one humanity one language). A... See more Reproduced here for pseudo-academic purposes from "The Loom of Language", Frederick Bodmer, George Allen & Unwin Ltd. (First edition, 1941):
VOLAPUK
The first constructed language which human beings actually spoke, read, wrote, and printed was Volapuk (1880). Its inventor was Johann Martin Schleyer, a German catholic priest, zealous alike in the cause of world-trade and universal brotherhood. Hence his motto: Menade bal puki bal (For one humanity one language). According to his disciples, he knew an amazing number of tongues. If so, he benefited little from his learning. It was evidently a handicap. It prevented him from understanding the difficulties of Volapuk for less gifted linguists.
The new medium spread very rapidly, first in Germany, then in France, where it found an able apostle in Auguste Kerckhoffs, professor of Modern Languages at the Paris High School for Commercial Studies. There was a French Association for the propagation of Volapuk, there were courses in it—and diplomas. Maybe with an eye on the annual turnover, a famous departmental store, Les Grands Magasins du Printemps, also espoused the cause. Success in France encouraged others, especially in the United States. By 1889, the year of its apogee, Volapuk had about 200,000 adherents, two dozen publications, supported by 300 societies and clubs. Enthusiastic amateurs were not the only people who embraced the new faith. Academically trained linguists also flirted with it.
Volapuk petered out much faster than it spread. When its partisans
had flocked together in Paris for the third Congress in 1889, the com
mittee had decided to conduct the proceedings exclusively in the new
language. This light-hearted decision, which exposed the inherent
difficulties of learning it or using it, was its death-knell. A year later
the movement was in full disintegration. What precipitated collapse
was a family quarrel. Father Schleyer had constructed the grammar of
his proprietary product with the redundant embellishments of his own
highly inflected language. Professor Kerckhoffs, supported by most of
the active Volapiikists, spoke up for the plain man and called for
reduction of the frills. In the dispute which ensued, Schleyer took the
line that Volapuk was his private property. As such, no one cowld
amend it without his consent.
It is impossible to explain the amazing, though short-lived success of Volapuk in terms of its intrinsic merits. There was a monstrous naivete in the design of it. A short analysis of its sounds, grammar, and vocabulary suffices to expose its retreat in the natural line of linguistic progress. Part of the comedy is that Schleyer had the nerve to claim that he had taken spoken English as his model, with due regard to any merits of German, French, Spanish, and Italian. The vowel battery of Schleyer's phonetic apparatus was made up of a, e, i, o, w, together with the German a, 8, u, of which the last is notoriously difficult for English-speaking people to pronounce. In conformity with his German bias, the consonants included the guttural ch sound. Out of chivalrous consideration for children, elderly people, and China's four hundred million, Schleyer discarded the r sound in favour of I (absent in Japanese) and other substitutes. This happened before anyone drew Schleyer's attention to the fact that the Chinese have an r. By then he had changed our English red or German rot to led. Similarly rose becomes lol.
In the grammar of Volaptik the noun, like the noun of German and unlike that of Anglo-American or of any Romance language, trailed behind it case-marks with or without the uniform plural -S. In this way father becomes:
SINGULAR PLURAL
Nomin. fat fats
Ace. fati fatis
Gen. fata fatas
Dat. fate fates
There was no grammatical gender. Where sex raised its ugly head the simple noun form represented the male, which could assimilate the lady-like prefix ji-, as in blod-jiblod (brother-sister) and dog-jidog (dog- i bitch). The adjective was recognizable as such by the suffix -ik, e.g.' gudik (good), supplemented by -el when used as a noun, e.g. gudikel (the good man), jigudikel (the good woman). Gain on the roundabouts by levelling tt^ personal pronoun (ob = I, ol — thou, obs — we, oh — you, etc.) was lost on the swings, because each person had four cases (e.g. ob, obi, oba, obe). From the possessive adjective derived from the pronoun by adding the suffix -ik, e.g. obik (my), you got the possessive pronoun by an additional -el, e.g. obikel (mine). Conjugation was a bad joke. In what he had to learn about the vagaries of the Vola-puk verb, the Chinese paid a heavy price for the liquidation of r. Whether there was or was not an independent subject, the personal pronoun stuck to the verb stem. So fat lofom literally meant the fathei love he. There were six tenses, as in Latin, each of them with its owi characteristic vowel prefixed to the stem, presumably in imitation c the Greek augment:
lofob I love. ilofob I had loved.
dlofob I loved. olofob I shall love.
elSfob I have loved. ulofob I shall have loved.
Strange to say, the prefix a- of the imperfect and the o- of the future
also appeared on adverbs formed from del (day), adela (yesterday),
adelo (to-day). There were characteristic suffixes for a subjunctive and
a potential mood, and each with all six tense forms, e.g. elofomla (that
he has loved). By prefixing p- you could change the active to the
passive, and interpolate an /immediately after the tense-mark to signify
habitual action. So it was possible to make one word to say of a woman
that she had been loved all the time. The Schleyer imperative, like the
Schleyer deity, was threefold, with a gentle will-you-please form in -d's,
a normal one in -od, and a categorical of the won't-you-shut-up sort in
-oz. The mark of interrogation was a hyphenated li, prefixed or suffixed,
and the negative particle was no placed before the verb, e.g. no-li
elofons-la? (will you not have loved?). If admittedly more regular than
either, Volapiik had almost as many grammatical impedimenta as
Sanskrit or Lithuanian. , - > =.;
The Volapukists rightly claimed that the root-material of their language was taken from English, German, Latin, and its modern descendants. Unluckily, the roots suffered drastic castigation from Father Schleyer's hands before they became unrecognizable in the Volapiik lexicon. The memory of the beginner had nothing to bite on. All roots had to conform with a set of arbitrary conditions. To take on several prefixes and suffixes, they had to be monosyllabic, and even so the enormous length to which such a word could grow forced Schleyer to italicize the root itself. He had to alter all words which ended in a sibilant (c, s, z, etc.) to accommodate the plural s; and every root had to begin and end with a consonant. From this German sausage-machine, knowledge emerged as nol, difficulty as fikul, and compliment as plim, the German word Feld as fel, Licht as lit, and Wunde as vim. The name of the language itself illustrates the difficulties of detection. Even geographical names did not escape punishment. Italy, England, and Portugal became Tal, Nelij, and Bodugdn. Europe changes to Yulop, and the other four continents to Melop, Silop, Fikop, and Talop. Who would guess that Vol in Volapiik comes from world, and ptik from speech?
The method of word-derivation was as fanciful, as illogical, and as silly as the maltreatment of roots. In the manner of the catalanguages, there was a huge series of pigeon-holes each labelled with some affix.
For instance, the suffix -el denotes inhabitants of a country or person-agents. So Parisel (Parisian) wore the same costumes as mitel (butcher). The suffix -of denoted some animals, e.g. suplaf (spider), tiaf (tiger)5but lein (lion) and jeval (horse) were left out in the cold. The names of birds had the label -it, e.g. galit (nightingale), the names of diseases -ip, e.g. vatip (hydropsy), and the names of elements -in, e.g. vatin (hydrogen). The prefix /«- produced something ambiguously nasty. Thus luvat (more literally dirty water) stood for urine. Lubien (a nasty bee) was a Volapuk wasp, Schleyer's technique of building compounds of Teutonic length turned the stomachs of his most devoted French disciples. As a sample, the following is the opening of Schleyer's translation of the Lord's Prayer:
" O Fat obas, kel binol in suls, paisaludomoz nem olal Komomod monargan ola! Jenomoz vil olik, as in sill, i su tal!"
We can understand the success of Volapuk only if we assume that it satisfied a deep, though still uncritical, longing equally acute in humanitarian and commercial circles. So it was a catastrophe that a German: parish priest provided this longing with ephemeral satisfaction at such a low technical level. For a long time to come the naivetes of Volapuk and its well-deserved collapse discredited the artificial language movement. Curiously enough it found many disciples in academic circles1,, including language departments of universities, always the last refuge of lost causes. The American Philosophical Society, founded by Benjamin Franklin, though sympathetic to proposals for a world-auxiliary, was not taken in. It appointed a committee in 1887 to assess the merits of Schleyer's interlanguage. In a very enlightened report the committee: formulated principles of which some should be embodied in any future constructed world-auxiliary. It rejected Volapuk because its grammatical structure turns back on the analytical drift of all the more modern European languages, and because its vocabulary is not sufficiently international.
The committee suggested the issue of an invitation to all learned societies of the world with a view to starting an international committee for promoting a universal auxiliary based on an Aryan vocabulary consonant with the "needs of commerce, correspondence, conversation^ and science." About two thousand learned bodies accepted this invitation of Franklin's Society to a Congress to be held in London or Paris. The Philological Society of London declined the.invitation with thanks, for reasons equally fatuous. One was that there was no common Aryan vocabulary. The other was that Volapiik was used all over the world. It was therefore too late in the day to offer a substitute.
After the third Congress of 1889, votaries of Volapiik washed their hands of the whole business, or ratted. Many of those who ratted followed the rising star of Esperanto. Some regained confidence and continued to tinker with Schleyer's system. Before the final collapse St. de Max had preferred Bopal (1887), and Bauer Spelin (1888). Thereafter came Fieweger's Dil (1893), Dormoy's Balta (1893), W. von Arnim's Veltparl (1896), and Bollack's Langue Blew (1899). There were several other amendments to Volapiik with the same basic defects. The stock-in-trade of all was a battery of monosyllabic roots, cut to measure from natural languages, and that past human recognition, or cast in an even less familiar mould from an arbitrary mixture of vowels and consonants. The root was a solitary monolith surrounded by concentric stone-circles of superfluous, if exquisitely regular flexions. There was declension and conjugation of the traditional type, and a luxuriant overgrowth of derivative affixes. The essential problem of word-economy was not in the picture. Indeed, the inventor of La Langue Bleue (so-called because the celestial azure has no frontiers) boasted that 144,139 different words were theoretically possible within the framework of his phonetics.
/'Before Volapiik, far better artificial languages had appeared on the market without attracting enthusiastic followers. One was Pirro's Universal-Sprache, a purely a posteriori system of a very advanced type. The noun, like the adjective, is invariant. Prepositions take over any function which case-distinction may retain in natural languages. The outward and visible sign of number is left to the article or other determinants. The personal pronoun with a nominative and an accusative form has no sex-differentiation in the third person. A verb without person or number flexions has a simple past with the suffix -ed, a future with -rai, and compound tenses built with the auxiliary haben. Unlike so many before and after him, Pirro did not shirk the task of designing a vocabulary. His lexicon consisted of 7,000 words, largely Latin, hence international, but partly Teutonic. The number of affixes for derivatives was small, but since he took them over from natural languages they were not particularly precise. The merits of the following specimen of the Universal-Sprache speak for themselves:
Men senior, I sende evos un gramatik e un varb-bibel de un nuov glot nomed universal glot. In futur I scriptrai evos semper in did glot, I pregate evos responden ad me in dit self glot.
Though it discouraged some, Volapuk also stimulated others to set out along new paths. More than one disillusioned Volapukist recovered to undertake the task which Schleyer had executed with maladroit results. One ex-Volapiik enthusiast, Julius Lott, invented Mundolingue (1890). It was a neo-Latin language. A moderately well-educated person can quite easily read it, as the following specimen shows:
Amabil amico.
Con grand satisfaction mi ha lect tei letter de le mundolingue. Le possibilita de un universal lingue pro le civilisat nations ne esse dubitabil, nam noi ha tot elements pro un tal lingue in nostri lingues, sciences, etc.
Another language which owed its existence to Volapiik renegades was Idiom Neutral (1903). It was designed by members of the Akademi Internasional de lingu universal. This body came into being at the Second Volapiik Congress. When it developed heretic doctrines the great Datuval (inventor) unsuccessfully excommunicated the rebels. The claim of Idiom Neutral in its own time was that it had a vocabulary based on the principle of greatest international currency. The reader who compares Schleyer's version of the opening words of the Lord's Prayer (p. 20) with the following can see how completely it had grown apart from Volapuk:
Nostr patr kel es in sieli! Ke votr nom es sanktifiked; ke votr regnia veni;'ke votr volu es fasied, kuale in siel, tale et su ter.
Note: Text scanned and OCR'd, but not proof-read. ▲ Collapse
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Chris Hughes
United Kingdom
Local time: 17:12
Albanian to English
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| Volapuk and Esperanto | Mar 11, 2010 |
Hello Rad,
Perhaps not surprisingly, Esperantists use the expression: "tio estas al mi nura volapukaĵo" to equate to the English "it's all Greek to me", or "it's all nonsense". It's one of the few "indigenous" slang words in Esperanto.
| | | | juvera
Local time: 17:12
English to Hungarian
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PCovs wrote:
We use it in Denmark still - no idea when it started, and yes it means to speak gibberish or something.
Perhaps Sarkozy has read an old book recently or had the company of a Dane?
Sarkozy learnt it from his father.
"Volapük" has been around in Hungarian more or less since the language was invented, over a century ago. Having a pretty incomprehensible language anyway, I think it seemed a good idea for our ancestors to try to learn it, but at the end, because it proved to be so impractical, it became a byword for curious and incomprehensible speech.
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