![]() To achieve this purpose, Schleyer wrote a number of original collections of aphorisms and poems, but he also translated longer texts, predominantly religious works. And finally, they functioned as a means of demonstrating the usefulness of the language and its capacity to produce intelligible text beyond the barest everyday needs. Translations, for Schleyer, undoubtedly also helped develop the vocabulary of his language. Many members of the Volapük community communicated through letters and newspapers in Volapük, and the latter often contained translation samples designed to demonstrate how the language was supposed to be used. Above all, they served as teaching and learning aids for the new language. But translations into Volapük fulfilled purposes other than conveying information. Why did Schleyer translate excerpts of the Qur’an into Volapük? Clearly, most Volapük speakers who wanted to learn about the contents of the Qur’an would have found it easier to do so in their first language. In the 1880s, at least two hundred Volapük clubs formed, mostly in Europe, although there were some in Asia and North America as well. Within a decade, it had become the most successful constructed auxiliary language ever, and probably only the second, after the less widespread Solresol, that found a transregional community of speakers. On the other hand, he was an ardent advocate of umlauts (ä, ö, ü) which, as a consequence, featured heavily in Volapük. Volapük had a complex but regular grammar and was designed to be phonetically easy for example, Schleyer tried to avoid the phoneme ‘r’ in order to make the language accessible to Chinese speakers. Based on his knowledge of a wide variety of languages (which apparently, however, did not include Arabic), he developed a linguistic system based on monosyllabic roots, inspired by German, English, French, Italian, Spanish and Russian, from which all of Volapük’s words were derived. Schleyer came up with the idea for creating his language in 1878, aiming to produce a tool that would remove all barriers to communication throughout the world, later captured in the slogan ‘Menade bal püki bal’ (‘One language for one mankind’). The translator was none other than the Catholic priest Johann Martin Schleyer (1831–1912), the inventor (‘datuvel’) of Volapük (from vol = ‘world’ and pük = ‘language’). Sold at the moderate price of 45 pfennig, the booklet, which contained fourteen pages of text, was entitled Sets veütikün ä blefikün mosleminbiba (‘korana’) or ‘The most important and concise sentences from the Muslim Bible (“Qur’an”)’. It is a fascinating document that gives us insight into the position of the Qur’an in nineteenth-century Europe, and also of contemporaneous perspectives on language, language planning, literature and translation. In 1890, in the Southern German city of Konstanz, a booklet comprising a collection of excerpts from the Qur’an into the ‘world language’ Volapük was published. ![]()
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