Abstract

"La tot' homoze in familje konunigare so debà," sang Ludwig Zamenhof in 1877, in celebration of his nineteenth birthday. The language of the song, Esperanto, was of his own invention, but the sentiment was not: All mankind must unite in one family. Within fifty years, that same idea could have found expression in any number of international languages—from Solresol, in which every phoneme is sung, to Volapük, an improbably popular, vaguely Germanic tongue that attracted tens of thousands of speakers before collapsing under the weight of its own unwieldy grammar. For the slightly less ambitious, there was the spelling reform movement, which attempted to turn English into a sort of universal language by dramatically simplifying its orthography.

pdf

Share