1922] on Auxiliary International Languages 537 



Having got his vocabulary, Schleyer's object was to construct by 

 means of a perfectly regular and uniform system of inflexions a most 

 complete and rich grammar, one that would surpass all Living lan- 

 guages in its variety and in its power of expressing shades of thought. 

 All nouns had a declension, e.£. : — 



The conjugation of the verb was so rich that the Volapuk verb 

 was claimed to possess more than half a million forms. Professor 

 Guerard quotes an amusing example of this inflexional or agglutina- 

 tive wealth : — 



Ulofofs-oz 

 " Ladies, I charge you to have loved by a certain time ! " 



As Professor Guerard has well expressed it, Yolapiik grammar is an 

 example of the synthetic method run riot. Yolapiik belongs to the 

 class of "mixed" languages, in which borrowed and arbitrary ele- 

 ments are more or less logically combined. Nevertheless, in spite of 

 its many difficulties and its a priori elements, it represented an 

 enormous advance on the purely artificial or a priori systems of 

 Wilkins, Sotos Ochando, and many others. It presents us with the 

 first great attempt to build up, from a small stock of existiug root- 

 words, a synthetic auxiliary international language based on an 

 autonomous system of word-formation and on a perfectly regular 

 inflexional grammar. In its day it had a great success. At first it 

 spread slowly, but about 1885 it was actively taken up in France, its 

 chief partisan and exponent being Dr. Auguste Kerckhoffs, Professor 

 of Modern Languages at the School of Higher Commercial Studies 

 in Paris. From France it spread to all parts of the world. Three 

 International Congresses were held, the third taking place in Paris 

 in 1889. At that time there were 283 Volapuk Clubs spread all over 

 the world, 316 textbooks had appeared, and there were some 30 

 periodicals appearing in Yolapiik or dealing with it. In order that 

 you may see a sample of this language I give here the Lord's Prayer 

 in Yolapiik : — 



" O Fat obas, kel binol in siils, paisaludomoz nem ola. Komomod 

 monargan ola. Jenomoz vil olik, as in siil, i su tal. Bodi obsik viideliki 

 giovolos obes adelo. E pardolos obes debis, as id obs aipardobs debeles 

 obas. E no obis nindukolos in tentadi, sed aidalivolos obis de bad. 

 Jenosod." 



Some of it looks rather strange to our eyes. But it was this 

 strangeness that gave Yolapiik a definite and distinctive character, 

 and prevented it from looking like a hotch-potch of existing languages. 

 The disappearance of Yolapiik was due largely to the internal dissen- 



