Reviewed by Peter Freeouf, Chiang Mai University

Few people will have ever heard of Volapük, and fewer still will know its characteristics and structure, At one time, it was a widely touted artificial ‘international’ language praised for its simplicity and regularity of morphology.

Volapük was the invention of a German Catholic priest, Johann Martin Schleyer, who devised the language in 1879–1880. The Volapük movement soon caught on, especially in Europe. There were three Volapük conventions between the years 1884 and 1889, the last being held in Paris, where only Volapük was used in the official proceedings. During this period there were numerous clubs established, and many teaching manuals and other publications appeared. By the end of the century, however, Volapük, had been pushed aside by Esperanto, with the first publication by its inventor, Ludwig Zamenhoff, appearing in 1887.

This guidebook to the language is a reprint of a work that first appeared in London in 1888, when enthusiasm for the new language was at its height. The Volapük vocabulary is based mainly on English, with some German, but whose truncated forms obscure their origin. The name of the language itself is a good example of this: Volapük, where vola- is the genitive case form of vol ‘people,’ from German Volk, followed by pükm based on the English ‘speak.’

The nouns, adjectives, and pronouns are all inflected with identical endings in four cases (e.g. nominative, genitive, dative, and accusative), with the morpheme –s (from English) added to the singular forms to form the plural. There is also obligatory agreement between nouns and adjectives in case and number. The verbs present a complex array of forms, with different inflectional morphemes for the finite categories of person, number, tense, mood, and voice, and for the various non-finite forms including infinitives, participles, supines, and gerundives.

The book begins with a short preface and introduction. Part 1 provides a brief overview of the structure of the language, its creator, and the favorable reception it received at the time. Part 2 presents the letters and pronunciation in addition to the complex, but highly regular, inflectional morphology. There are lists of prepositions, adverbs, and derivational morphemes interspersed through this section. Part 3 is a discussion of the syntax. This is mainly presented in the form of exercises, with vocabulary lists and answer keys. Part 4 is a collection of texts in Volapük, followed by translations, or originals, in English. Part 5 is a series of conversations, in parallel columns in Volapük and English. An appendix in Part 6 contains groups of words organized by subject matter. The final section, Part 7, contains a Volapük–English glossary.

It is difficult to say whether this book will find a wide audience outside the small group of linguists who study constructed auxiliary languages. In historical terms, Volapük is important in that it was the first constructed language to gain widespread adherents and promoters. It set the stage for later, more successful artificial languages, above all, Esperanto, but also Ido and Interlingua. These later languages are much more similar in sound and written appearance to their standard average European language sources than Volapük is, which at first sight does not seem to be derived from an Indo-European language.