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This is an old revision of this page, as edited by Loserdog3000 (talk | contribs) at 16:54, 7 July 2006. The present address (URL) is a permanent link to this revision, which may differ significantly from the current revision.

If there's no objection, I'm going to move this back to Volapuk. The "language" disambiguator is unnatural with languages that have their own names, rather than being derived adjectives (and thus don't have anything to disambiguate against!) --Brion 19:28 Sep 23, 2002 (UTC)

De Gaulle said something about volapuk, (really !) I should verify where and when.... Réf : http://www.dna.fr/dna/pflimlin/4431_0.html

Volapük just don't get no respect, it seems. :) --Brion

It has some pejorative sense in France since... Mainly used for European Affairs and mainly by anti-europeans the abominable Jean-Marie Le Pen use it sometimes.

Could someone translate the links in (presumably) Volapük at the bottom of the article? This is an English article, after all... --cprompt

I commented out the Volapuk text. If you can, please translate to English and restore to the article. --cprompt 04:24, 18 Apr 2004 (UTC)

The a in Volapük

I have a question about Volapük I believe should be addressed in the article: is the a in Volapük connective, or genitive, or what?

It's genitive. I just added a section on compound formation. --Jim Henry 19:23, 30 Jun 2004 (UTC)

Number of V speakers?

"There are an estimated 20-30 Volapük speakers in the world today."

Can this number be correct? Should it not be 20-30 THOUSAND?

I don't think so. It was only 100,000 at its peak 115 years ago, and has been in decline ever since. Googling about reveals (unsurprisingly) that no-one knows the exact number, but it was described as "a handful" in the 1960s, and more recently an Esperanto speaker described it as at most in the low triple digits, most of whom are Esperantists learning a different conlang for comaprison purposes. Securiger 12:06, 21 Jun 2004 (UTC)
20,000 or more is far too much, but I think 20-30 is too little, considering the astonishinh activity on the internet. It is impossible that 20-30 people, of whom certainly a lot would be elderly and probably incapable of creating a web site, can be so present at the World Wide Web. And indeed most of them will be Esperanto speakers as well, and most of them will be freaks whose pleasure is to learn as many languages as possible (like me fyi :)), but it is too vivid a movement to be that little.--Caesarion 12:43, 16 Feb 2005 (UTC)
"Astonishing activity on the internet"? There are two mailing lists, with low traffic and not many posters (though a larger number of subscribers). There are four major websites I know of; I think only three of them are maintained by fluent speakers of the language, the other is by a man who is interested in Volapük historically but is not a speaker. Most of the other web hits are mentions of V on websites of language buffs who are interested in the language but not apparently fluent speakers. I think 20-30 is almost certainly within one decimal order of magnitude of the correct value. --Jim Henry 15:28, 16 Feb 2005 (UTC)
I guess you're right, that means that the actual number of speakers lies between 1 and 999, including the bordering elements. That is quite vague indeed. In my humble opinion, two mailing lists and three websites is still to be called "astonishing activity" if there are only 20-30 speakers today. Not all speakers are to be found on the internet!--Caesarion 17:57, 17 Feb 2005 (UTC)
Perhaps I misused the term; I meant "between 2 and 200". Actually, I would be very surprised if the number of fluent speakers is over 50. Not all speakers are found on the Internet, but if all known people on the Internet who read and write Volapük fluently also speak it fluently (a questionable assumption), and there are ten non-Internet users for every Internet user among fluent Volapük speakers, that would still be well under 200.
But if you count everyone who has ever studied Volapük enough to (painstakingly, with frequent references to dictionaries) write an email in Volapük, you might get as many as 1000.
Possibly I could ask on the main Volapük mailing list for further input on this, but previous requests to the list for input on the Wikipedia article have not gotten results. --Jim Henry 18:22, 17 Feb 2005 (UTC)

Where is the largest Volapük collection?

An earlier version of the article had this sentence:

"The International Esperanto Museum in Vienna (Austria) holds the world's biggest collection of Volapük literature."

After adding notes on other large collections, I removed the note about IEM having the largest collection, because another source (the Esperanto Wikipedia article on Esperanto libraries) claimed that CDELI had the largest Volapük collection. If anyone can confirm that one claim or the other is true, we can note which has the largest collection.

I posted on the Volapük listgroup asking about this but have no reply yet. --Jim Henry 18:55, 30 Jun 2004 (UTC)

"A great name for a brilliant idea"

194.230.21.229 added a link to a nonexistent article Volapük - A great name for a brilliant idea to the external links section. I removed it. My guess is this person was trying to link to an external page and wasn't sure how. If you want to add an article on that theme, think about whether it fits Wikipedia's neutral point-of-view rules. Maybe you should instead add more text (in neutral tone) to this article about the advantages of Volapük over other languages? --Jim Henry 20:05, 1 Sep 2004 (UTC)

Origin of the idea

From Johann Martin Schleyer:

According to his own report, the idea of an international language arose out of a conversation he had with one of his parishioners, a semi-literate German peasant whose son had emigrated to America and could no longer be reached by mail because the United States Postal Service couldn't read the father's handwriting.

From the article:

Schleyer felt that God had told him in a dream to create an international language.

Unless God is a semi-literate German peasant, which is inconsistent with Catholic dogma, at least one of the accounts is wrong.

Fraktur

In some stage, Volapuk used Fraktur-like versions of the vowels instead of umlauts.

Naming fix, again

Somebody moved this page around to places like User:Ambush Commander/Mover and Volapük language. I've put it back at Volapük where it belongs and cleaned up the redirects (except for User:Ambush Commander/Mover, not sure what that's supposed to be...) --Brion 19:33, Jun 15, 2005 (UTC)

Sorry, that was my mistake. I was testing out a theory I had about page moves and it didn't work. Everything seems to be in the right places now though... Ambush Commander 21:27, Jun 15, 2005 (UTC)

Independence of Vp movement

I revised this

...but these are Esperantists who became interested in the history of constructed languages rather than the continuation of an independent tradition.

as it seemed to be an exaggeration. Not all speakers of Volapük are also speakers of Esperanto, and certainly not all of them are "Esperantists" in the sense of being active in the Esperanto movement. Also, there is indeed a continuous though sometimes tenuous tradition in the Volapük speaker community. --Jim Henry 17:20, 9 January 2006 (UTC)

Good to know, Jim. kwami 19:37, 9 January 2006 (UTC)

Number of words

Lang Maker says Volapuk has a Lexicon size of 1569.. does this mean it has just 1596 words, or am I just misunderstanding something? Could someone please explain? Thanks Loserdog3000 16:54, 7 July 2006 (UTC)

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