In the Land of Invented Languages - Arika Okrent [33]
The translation:
Dear Friend,
I can only imagine what kind of face you will make after receiving my letter. You will look at the signature and cry out, “Has he lost his mind? In what language did he write? What's the meaning of this leaflet that is added to the letter?” Calm down, my dear. My senses, at least as far as I believe, are all in order.
The translation shows that Zamenhof understood what kind of reaction this little experiment was likely to provoke. However, once the recipient had translated this far, another kind of reaction often set in. If you just tried the translation yourself, perhaps you know what I'm talking about. Are you a secret lover of sentence diagramming? A crossword puzzle aficionado? Have you ever read the dictionary for pleasure? Yeah, you know what I'm talking about. If you are a certain type of language-interested person, decoding an Esperanto letter can be an enjoyable little challenge. Much more enjoyable than reading a screed about the language's virtues.
The letter-writing test helped the language to spread. Small clubs of enthusiasts formed. Zamenhof came out with another textbook, a dictionary, and a translation of Hamlet, bringing into the world yet another rendering of the melancholy Dane's soliloquy on existence: “Ču esti aŭ ne esti,—tiel staras nun la demando.” The first Esperanto magazine, La Esperantisto, was published in 1889 in Germany. The movement attracted some prominent supporters, including Tolstoy, who wrote an essay for La Esperantisto on “the value of reason in solving religious problems.” When this resulted in a ban of the magazine in Russia, Tolstoy wrote to the authorities, promising not to contribute anything else to it. His plea couldn't prevent the magazine's downfall, but others were already rising to take its place.
Meanwhile, there was trouble in Volapükland. Volapük was the project of a German priest named Johann Schleyer, who got the idea to create a universal language directly from God during one sleepless night in 1879.
His system had great success in Germany and soon spread as far as the United States and China. By the end of the 1880s there were over two hundred Volapük societies and clubs in the world and twenty-five Volapük journals. Even people who didn't care to learn it at least knew about it. President Grover Cleveland's wife named her dog Volapük. The craze was big enough to be mocked in local papers such as the Milwaukee Sentinel:
A charming young student of Grük
Once tried to acquire Volapük
But it sounded so bad
That her friends called her mad, And she quit it in less than a wük.
Within a few years, most of the Volapükists had switched to Esperanto.
Those umlauts, the focus of many a Volapük lampoon, no doubt cost Schleyer a good number of English- and French-speaking customers. Not only did they add a threatening air of foreignness to the appearance of a Volapük text (“If ätävol-la in Yulop, älilädol-la pükik mödis”—“If you should travel in Europe you will hear many languages”); they also helped disguise the fact that Volapük was for the most part based on English roots. Pük (language), for example, comes from “speak,” but it's hard to tell. It's likewise hard to see the “love” in löf, the “smile” in smül, the “proof” in blöf, or the “explaining” in seplänön. The problem went beyond umlauts, though. Schleyer, in trying to adhere to his principles of easy pronunciation (no “th” sound, minimal use of r, one-syllable roots), turned “friend” into flen, “knowledge” into nol, and “world” into vol. (The word Volapük is a compound meaning “world language.”)
And for the childish mind the temptations of Volapük are great. If you think the word pük is funny, then you will love how it figures into all kinds of other words related to the concept of language:
Because I have one of those childish minds, I can't help