Talk:Volapük/Archive 1

message: I have a question about Volapük I believe should be addressed in the article: is the a in Volapük connective, or genitive, or what?
:It's genitive.  I just added a section on compound formation. --Jim Henry 19:23, 30 Jun 2004 (UTC)
thread_title:  The ''a'' in ''Volapük'' 

message: An earlier version of the article had this sentence:
:"The International Esperanto Museum in Vienna (Austria) holds the world's biggest collection of Volapük literature."
After adding notes on other large collections, I removed the note about IEM having the largest collection, because another source (the Esperanto Wikipedia article on Esperanto libraries) claimed that CDELI had the largest Volapük collection.  If anyone can confirm that one claim or the other is true, we can note which has the largest collection.
I posted on the Volapük listgroup asking about this but have no reply yet.
--Jim Henry 18:55, 30 Jun 2004 (UTC)
replies: text: You should have no problem visiting "both places" since the International Esperanto Museum is actually part of the Austrian National Library (cf. http://www.cs.chalmers.se/~martinw/esperanto/iemw/index_en.html) and are in the same place. 91.104.102.227 (talk) 09:42, 4 January 2008 (UTC)
thread_title:  Where is the largest Volap&uuml;k collection? 

message: 194.230.21.229 added a link to a nonexistent article Volapük - A great name for a brilliant idea to the external links section.  I removed it.  My guess is this person was trying to link to an external page and wasn't sure how.  If you want to add an article on that theme, think about whether it fits Wikipedia's neutral point-of-view rules.  Maybe you should instead add more text (in neutral tone) to this article about the advantages of Volapük over other languages?
--Jim Henry 20:05, 1 Sep 2004 (UTC)
thread_title:  "A great name for a brilliant idea" 

message: In some stage, Volapuk used Fraktur-like versions of the vowels instead of umlauts.
That is not exactly true. At some point (I think before the second Volapük congress), Schleyer actually came up with the idea of inventing new letters to replace ä, ö, and ü -- a, o, and u with a little 'dent' on the right side that gave them the aspect of the old German "Frakturschrift" -- but it was not really Fraktur. It reminded me more of those Vietnamese vowels with little hooks and mustaches (marking different tonal contours). Sérgio Meira 01:52 27 Oct 2006
::The Italian scanned method has examples but they are blotched in the scanning.
::I added a scan from a 1888 method. Strangely, ä is an open form quite difficult to distinguish from ü. The book is in German and Fraktur letters are visibly different. --Error 02:17, 3 December 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  Fraktur 

message: Lang Maker says Volapuk has a Lexicon size of 1569.. does this mean it has just 1596 words, or am I just misunderstanding something? Could someone please explain? Thanks Loserdog3000 16:54, 7 July 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  Number of words 

message: The article says a verb can be inflected 1,584 ways, but this site (in External Links) says it can be 505,440. Quite a large difference. 68.145.207.92 00:17, 25 March 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: The smaller figure is for revised Volapük, and the larger one for classical Volapük.Custardslice7 (talk) 09:44, 19 July 2008 (UTC)
thread_title:  Number of conjugations? 

message: I've added a trivia section--Pontoppidan 18:58, 14 August 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: I don't feel strongly about the issue, but I recommend you check out WP:TRIV. Ben Hocking (talk|contribs) 20:42, 23 August 2007 (UTC)

text: "Gibson brushed over or misconstrues the origins of volapük," I would say that this is still speculation. We don't know what Gibson's intentions were. Given that he ends his explanation with "They called it Volapuk. I guess you could say it was a joke," and that Gibson is no slouch on the research front, I would as easily believe that he meant that a Roman keypad approximation of Cyrillic would be anything but a universal language, hence the "joke." I think he might have assumed his readership would either know or find out the origins of the term (that's why I'm here), and that this usage is his own creation. (Typegeek 14:41, 26 August 2007 (UTC)
thread_title:  Trivia section added 

message: If the language only has 25-30 speakers, how does the Volapuk Wikipedia have 70,000+ articles? That's almost 3,000 articles per speaker! 74.234.38.56 17:10, 2 September 2007 (UTC)
replies: text:  Today it is more than 100 000 but "depth" is 0. More than 95% of the articles are stubs!212.50.147.101 16:01, 8 September 2007 (UTC)
replies: text:  Apparently most of them were created automatically by bots from geographical census data from various countries.  Try clicking the "random article" link several times in a row and see  how similar the articles you get are.  Don't laugh; the English Wikipedia had a similar preponderance of bot-created geographical articles in its early days. --Jim Henry 14:30, 12 September 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: I tried for a few minutes the "recent changed" (Votükams nulik) and my impression is that it is more than only stubs. Random clicking in this list showed quite some medium-size or even large entries, definitely far less than 95% stubs. The last 500 entries looked more or less like a one-man-show by one user (more than 95%). --78.51.29.226 (talk) 23:38, 19 December 2007 (UTC)
thread_title: Volapuk Wikipedia

message: Somebody should stop the Volapük Wikipedia from growing so fast! More than 95% of arcticle are stubs!!! User:CDHgrün  —Preceding unsigned comment added by 68.102.5.92 (talk) 15:23, 24 September 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: I don't think it's much of a problem.  As I pointed out earlier, at one point the English Wikipedia also had a preponderance of articles auto-generated from census data by a bot.  The person who ran the Vp census-bot has said he did it as a publicity stunt to attract attention to the language, and has no intention of continuing to use bots to expand the Vp Wikipedia now that he's gotten said attention. --Jim Henry 23:34, 4 October 2007 (UTC)
replies: text:  Hm… All other languages want attention too, don't you think so? Why almost dead Volapük should be listed on the Wikipedia front page in the same list as other major languages with 100000+ articles? It is called cheating. --Alexey V. Molchanov (talk) 07:01, 25 February 2008 (UTC)
replies: text:  When other wikipedias did the same thing (Polish, Italian, for example) nobody was complaining about this form of "cheating". I don't have a problem with it. The articles in question ARE in Volapük and they aren't any worse than their bot-generated counterparts in other wikipedias. —IJzeren Jan  Uszkiełtu? 10:19, 25 February 2008 (UTC)

text:  The list on the front page isn't an award, a publicity tool (though it clearly can be used as one) or a measure of the most widely spoken languages.  It is merely a rank by article count of the largest wikipedias.  Nothing need be done about any language appearing here.  In fact, the only thing that could be done about it would be a systematic deletion of Volapuk articles, which makes about an equally minimal amount of sense.  Any observer with even a basic understanding of languages by speaker population size would recognize quickly the complete lack of relationship between the list and the most spoken languages of the world. aremisasling (talk) 13:54, 10 March 2008 (UTC)

text: Hmm, Volapük might be dangerous, I'll take a look to what we can do against Vükipedia. ... said: Rursus (mbork³) 16:51, 30 September 2009 (UTC)
thread_title:  Somebody do something! 

message: Please do 'xplain: "synonyme", "ethymologically".
Thank You,
 hopiakuta  Please do  sign  your  signature  on your  message.  %7e%7e   Thank You. - 09:40, 19 October 2007 (UTC)
thread_title:  [[ synonyme ]] [[ ethymologically ]]

message: The article may say something about why did the language became popular toward the end of 19. century.
A curiosities section in a Czech language daily Pražský ilustrovaný kurýr from April 1, 1898 cites from a Swiss revue "Suisse", from article by Ernst? Naville about the recent international languages.  The revue says that the most common use for Volapük was to conduct business communication and that Volapük was used by about 2,000 companies employing on 13,000 people. Perhaps the small business owners considered it as a viable alternative. Pavel Vozenilek (talk) 00:13, 10 December 2007 (UTC)
thread_title:  Reasons to use 

message: The article claims that there are estimated to be 20 speakers, but the link is wrong.  It goes to an irrelevant story. I fear a hoax.--Jimbo Wales (talk) 21:59, 8 July 2008 (UTC)
replies: text: This link works fine for me and links to the article it described.  While I didn't check every claim of the article, it does seem to confirm the article.  It contains the claim about the 20 speakers: "There are by his count about 20 Volapük speakers in the world today," but there seems to be at least 20 people editing the Volapuk wikipedia. Jon513 (talk) 22:53, 8 July 2008 (UTC)

text: Can people who can only read and write the language, but not converse in it, be counted as speakers? Given a grammar reference, a dictionary and unlimited time, anyone with an IQ >95 can sort of cobble together sentences in Volapük or Esperanto. Does this mean we can claim 3 billion speakers for those languages? Gimme a break. We need to tighten up the standards for these claims.  —Preceding unsigned comment added by 75.89.24.134 (talk) 06:54, 10 November 2008 (UTC)
replies: text: Still, the idea of the "20" number doesn't sit well with the sister project with over 100,000 articles and 4,000 registered users. Am I missing something here? Sillyfolkboy (talk) 12:04, 1 April 2009 (UTC)
replies: text: Most of the Volapük Wikipedia's article are automated bot-created stubs. There are very few users writing substantial articles. 惑乱 Wakuran (talk) 16:39, 8 April 2009 (UTC)

text: And of course, "4.000 registered users" doesn't mean anything by itself. They could have registered for any reason, it's not evidence in any way, by itself. 惑乱 Wakuran (talk) 16:43, 8 April 2009 (UTC)

text: I think there is a difference between being a born speaker, a speaker who can do so if she has to, and a speaker who uses a device (handheld computer device, that is) to help her speak.   And secondly, if there are actually 20 people who were nativeborn speakers, why not list their names?   216.99.219.241 (talk) 07:40, 19 July 2009 (UTC)
thread_title:  Source for 20 speakers claim? 

message: I've changed the bit that says "ay/oy/uy" are acceptable alternatives to "ä/ö/ü", on the grounds that there's neglible evidence that they are. They are definitely illegal in Revised Volapük, and until someone can find proof that they were allowed in Classical Volapük, I don't think we should make the claim here.
I should add that the problem with adding those y's is that it can change the meaning of a word. For example, in revised Vp, "glidö" means "hello", but "glidoy" means "one greets" !!  Custardslice7 (talk) 19:07, 19 July 2008 (UTC)
replies: text: As far as I know there's only one Volapük speaker who uses those digraphs as ASCII substitutions for the umlauted vowels.  I've had a discussion with him before on the Vp mailing list about possibly using some other character than |y| that doesn't occur in the Vp alphabet for such digraphs (e.g. |q|) but we didn't come to any consensus. --Jim Henry (talk) 18:18, 16 September 2008 (UTC)
thread_title:  ay, oy, uy 

message: I'm starting to be fond of Volapük, because it is so anti all other pathetical Intauxlangs claiming:
:Look here! No grammar!
all the same providing an informal non-formulated syntactical grammar, that the poor language learner can read about nowhere but have to guess!! Now, it seems the 1931 deJong reformed Volapük deteriorated the language from the original originality. I would rather add circa 10 cases and make flexing forms to make it more forceful. ... said: Rursus (mbork³) 16:58, 30 September 2009 (UTC)
replies: text: (No, de Jong added one case, so it is a slight improvement. 9 left to be added! ... said: Rursus (mbork³) 07:49, 1 October 2009 (UTC)
thread_title: Nice

message: In association to the above discussion on number of speakers: there are no proof that there are any "speakers" at all, but there seems to be at least 2 or 3 pretty fluent writers in Volapük. The language evokes more interest than f.ex. Novial, comparing facebook memberships of Volapük vs. Novial gives 63 vs. 39, there are  at least a few pretty fluent writers, and everything else is fuzzy, unclear, disguised and pretty unknown. ... said: Rursus (mbork³) 10:54, 1 October 2009 (UTC)
thread_title: Number of "speakers"

message: Isn't the number of these languages in fact two? Can't we just say "two"?
When a tribe is discovered living under a tree in the Amazon and using Volapük to mean gibberish, the paragraph can be changed to read "three".
99.237.143.219 (talk) 16:37, 2 July 2013 (UTC)
thread_title:  Meaning nonsense "in certain languages"