NA TURE 



[May 3, 1888 



very name, Volapiik, is taken from German and English. 

 ^/represents the German Volk,piik the English speech, 

 so that vola-piik means originally folk-speech. In the same 

 manner appetite has been replaced by potit, abundance 

 by bundan, silver by silef, Jew by yudel, house by dom. 

 In many cases these borrowed words have been so much 

 changed that it is difficult to recognize them. Here 

 Pasilingua has a great advantage. All its words remind 

 us of a Teutonic or Romanic prototype, or of English, 

 which has amalgamated these two elements in its dic- 

 tionary. Volapiik often requires a commentary, where 

 Pasilingua allows us to guess with a good chance of 

 success. Thus — 



What o'clock is it ? is in Volapiik Diip kimid binos f in 

 Pasilingua Quota hora er al? 



Where do you live ? is in Volapiik Kiplace lodens ? in 

 Pasilingua Ubi habitirs His? 



The sentence, Advertisements are to the man of busi- 

 ness what steam is to industry, has been rendered in Vola- 

 piik by Lenunc binoms jafaman otos kelos stemplo dust or • 

 in Pasilingua by Annoncius ers pro tos affdriros qua ta 

 vapor a pro ta i/idustriu. 



After Volapiik has once chosen what may be called its 

 stems, which consist mostly of a consonant, a vowel, and 

 a consonant only, everything else becomes easy enough 

 Thus if fat stands for father, we get a simple declen- 

 sion : — 



It is clear that there are ever so many ways by which 

 the same result might be obtained, so long as the prin- 

 ciple is strictly adhered to that each case shall have but 

 one sign, and that the same sign is to be used in the 

 plural and the singular, while the plural again is indi- 

 cated by a sign of its own. In Bengali and many other 

 languages the same principle is carried out with consider- 

 able consistency. What applies to declension applies to 

 conjugation, to degrees of comparison, and to derivation. 

 All becomes regular, simple, intelligible, whatever set of 

 suffixes, prefixes, or infixes we adopt. Thus, to have is 

 lab in Volapiik. Hence : — 



Singular. 

 labob, I have 

 labol, thou hast 

 labom, he has 

 labof she has 

 labos, it has 

 labon, one has 



Plural. 

 labobs, we have 

 labols, you have 

 laboms, Ihey have 



By assigning to each suffix one peculiar power, Pasilingua 

 distinguishes : mortu, death, morto, dead, morte, dead 

 (fern.), morta, dead (neut.), mortiro, dying, mortaro, 



murderer, mortamenta, instrument of murder, mortana, 

 poison, mortarea, battle-field, mortitarea, churchyard, 

 mortiblo, mortal, mortablo, fatal, mortoblo, easy to kill, 

 niorter, to be dead, mortir, to die, mortar, to kill, mortor, 

 to be killed, &c. 



These few extracts will give our readers an idea of what 

 they have to expect from Volapiik, Pasilingua, and Spelin. 

 Spelin has nothing to do with spelling. It is derived from 

 lin, the abbreviated stem of lingua. Pe (from Greek pas) 

 means all, s on account of its continuous buzzing sound is 

 used to form collective nouns ; hence s-pe-lin means all- 

 language, or Pasilingua. 



The study of these systems is by no means without 

 interest and advantage. It will help to clear people's 

 ideas about the great complexity of language, and 

 show how simple a process grammar really is. If 

 more generally adopted, as Volapiik seems likely to 

 be, such a system of writing may become even prac- 

 tically useful, particularly for telegraphic communication. 

 That it could ever supplant our spoken language is out 

 of the question, and Dr. Schleyer, the inventor of 

 Volapiik, distinctly disclaims any such intention (" Haupt- 

 gedanken," p. 10, note). One protest only we have to 

 enter before leaving the subject. Nothing could be a 

 greater mistake than to imagine that these clever and 

 amusing experiments have anything in common with 

 Leibniz's conception of a philosophical language. What 

 Leibniz had in his mind may be guessed from the " Essay 

 towards a Real Character and a Philosophical Language," 

 by Bishop Wilkins, London, 1668, of which an abstract 

 is given in Max Midler's " Lectures on the Science of 

 Language " (vol. ii. p. 50). This is as different from 

 Volapiik as the Kriegspiel is from real warfare. For 

 spending a dreary afternoon pleasantly, an experimental 

 study of Volapiik, Pasilingua, or Spelin, may safely be 

 recommended. Lingualumi?ia is a more serious matter. 

 It is built on an exhaustive analysis of the notions that 

 have to be expressed, and thus approaches nearer to the 

 ideal which Leibniz had conceived of a perfect and 

 universal language. 



BRIDGE CONSTRUCTION. 



A Practical Treatise on Bridge Construction : being a 

 Text-book on the Design and Construction, of Bridges 

 in Iron and Steel. For the Use of Students; Draughts- 

 men, and Engineers. By T. Claxton Fidler, M.Inst. 

 C.E. (London : Charles Griffin and Co., 1887.) 



THIS book is principally intended for practical use by 

 engineers and draughtsmen, who are now being 

 called upon to design and construct bridges of unprece- 

 dented magnitude, like the Forth Bridge, which the 

 introduction of iron, and latterly more especially of steel, 

 has rendered possible. The execution of these require- 

 ments has brought forward a number of new problems 

 to be solved in Statics, and the Elasticity and Strength 

 of Materials, and has invested old problems with an im- 

 portance which they did not before possess. Evolution in 

 this branch of creation has gone on so rapidly that the 

 Darwinian student of the " survival of the fittest " might 

 turn to this book for striking exemplifications of his 

 theories, which he would find in the classification of 



