Volapük

Volapük, a name made up (out of vol, shortened from the English world, and pük for speak) for a universal language invented in 1879 by Johann Martin Schleyer, a Swabian pastor afterwards engaged in teaching in Constance. The vocabulary is mainly based on English (to the extent of about a third, Latin and the Romance tongues furnishing about a fourth), and the grammar is simplified to the utmost. Declension is in every case accomplished by the addition of the vowels -a, -e, and -i to the root for genitive, dative, and accusative respectively; s is the sign of the plural; and verbs are conjugated by help of -ob, -om, -ol, and -of (for I, thou, he, she, &c.). The cause was taken up in many lands, and within ten years there were grammars of Volapük prepared in twenty languages by the author (besides a mass of others), and dictionaries innumerable; while there were over twenty papers published in Volapük, and associations in most civilised lands for the practice and extension of this artificial tongue. Subsequently the progress of the system was checked. The most practical disciples limited their aims to making Volapük a convenience for commercial correspondence, a kind of extended international code. There are grammars in English by the inventor, by Harrison, Kerckhoffs, Kirchhoff, Sprague, &c., and dictionaries by Krause, Wood, Linderfelt, &c.