It's Volapuk to me: trying to build the tower of Babel

People have never forgotten the legend about the tower of Babel. Nevertheless, they have always tried to restore the harmony that was once lost and to destroy all the language barriers

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People have never forgotten the legend about the tower of Babel. Nevertheless, they have always tried to restore the harmony that was once lost and to destroy all the language barriers. Tommaso Campanella, Rene Decartes, Isaac Newton were among those, who dreamed of creating the universal language. Russian empress Catherine the Great summoned a special commission for studying foreign languages with the final goal of working out a universal one. In 1871 Karl Marx claimed that the international development of labor unions was impeded by the difference in people's languages. The main criterion for the international language had to be the ability of this language to give no advantages to any nation.
 
The first international language that became successful was not Esperanto as believed by many people but the language that was called Volapuk. The word itself is surrounded by prejudices and is often used in different languages in the meaning of gibberish. The dreadful word Volapuk is traditionally used to scare the students and to make them feel their ignorance.

Actually Volapuk was an artificial language that was used for the international communication. The father of this language was the German Catholic priest Johann Martin Sсhleyer who published it in 1880. The language grammar was far from an easy one. Still, it was logical and did not allow any exceptions to the rule. The general principle was: say as you write and write as you read. The stress always fell on the last syllable. The words as if were made of different bricks: the vocabulary was borrowed from English, French, German and Latin. Schleyer usually used only parts of words that were combined like meccano. The very word Volapuk is a combination of two English words that were changed greatly: world became vol and speak turned into puk.

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