Volapük: A Cautionary Tale for Language Communities | Hacker News Reader

Volapük: A Cautionary Tale for Language Communities

tonyarcieri.com

80 pointsanewhnaccount82 comments

He mentions Lojban[0] but ironically fails to note that Lojban itself is a fork of Loglan[1].

It came about because the late Dr. James Cooke Brown, inventor of Loglan, tried to keep tight control over its development by claiming intellectual property rights over it. However, Brown did not move fast enough toward finalizing, formalizing and documenting the language to satisfy some of the enthusiastic and inventive community that had formed around it.

A group of those enthusiasts kept the basic concepts and syntax of Loglan (which they deemed not copyrightable) and created a new basic vocabulary to replace the words that Brown or the Loglan Institute could claim ownership of. (Reminiscent of the IP disputes over APIs versus implementations.) The result was Lojban, which continues to have a small community and a collection of translated documents and tutorials.

[0] https://mw.lojban.org/papri/Lojban [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loglan

Which makes me think that the lesson of this story is not "avoid forking at all costs", but that building anything universal is a fragile endeavor. Anybody can just come along and obsolete your status with respect to that goal. As for being forgotten, it seems inevitable, if universality is your only selling point.

One of my favorite things I've learned during my time studying Esperanto is the word "volapukaĵo", which is constructed from "volapuk" as the root and means "nonsense".

"Tio estas volapukaĵo al mi" is the Esperanto equivalent of "It's all Greek to me!"

I've heard it claimed that there's an analogous verb volapuki 'to babble, talk nonsense' (but never seen someone use it).

Esperanto is very flexible about transforming verbs/nouns/adjectives into one another, so probably.

Adjective would be volapuka (nonsensical)?

Adverb would be volapuke (nonsensically?)

Turns out Danish has the same construction in use ("thats just volapük [incomprehensible] to me"), so it's not just one conlang throwing shade at another.

> lesson to be learned here: any language is only as strong as its community

Or maybe it's better lesson is that no one tries to force the direction of the language. English is a bastard language, no one "controls", even as much as our grammar school teachers try to force us to use the proper form. I always find it interesting that many people who learn English as a second language often understand and know the formal rules of the language better than those of us who've spoken it natively.

The examples that the OP point out are top down choices made by "leaders" of the community. Those leaders may have created the original programming language, but then fail to realize that it is not they that control it, it is the community. And communities often don't want to be forced in one direction or another. What they like is for things to be grass roots, everyone in the community recognizes the issue, a proposal is put forward, and everyone then agrees and progress is made.

This is one reason that I'm enjoying Rust's process, example: try!(..) was a macro based bandaid over the unwieldy nature of the strong error Result type in the language, it's usage has created code which is ugly and verbose. Enter Swift with its ? syntax and everyone recognizes that this is a less verbose and cleaner way to represent the same concept. So Rust is in the process of adopting ? (It's in nightly now I believe). I don't think there is much controversy here, and the community recognizes the importance of adopting this language change (I read through the RFC and don't remember anyone against it, just differences on the scope of its meaning).

In English there have been similar things, and the controllers have always tried to stop their usage, "ain't" is a great example of that. English teachers across the US have always tried to stop its usage as a fake low class word, but it's just too good and they ain't going to stop it.

But Rust is still a controlled language in that there's a language committee updating it. It's just that the committee actually listens to its community.

A true bottoms-up-controlled programming language would have to allow users to redefine keywords and grammar, then allow users to drift the language over time. Eventually you'll have multiple subgroups (accents) and one person's compiler might choke on the line `if x ain't 3`

And its name would be Lisp.

or SQL for that matter. Same same, but different.

_Users_ can't redefine keywords and grammar in SQL, can they? All you can do is create data structures, and write functions and procedures.

Yes, you can write code that creates functions and procedures; it might even be possible to write code that modifies itself, but that still would be essentially different from what one can do in Lisp and Forth.

Forth probably even more, since most things that are statements in other languages can be defined inside Forth, and you can end up easily building mutually incomprehensible DSLs even if they're technically runnable by the same interpreter.

Forth was the other example that came to mind. And possibly Haskell and Scala. But Lisp is the one that's well known with language extensibility as an advertised feature.

> I always find it interesting that many people who learn English as a second language often understand and know the formal rules of the language better than those of us who've spoken it natively.

I believe that's true for any natural language. To a native speaker, its rules are so natural (almost as breathing) that they hardly ever think about it. Frequently they don't even realize there's a question of picking the right form, because their brain does that job for them.

It's always the foreign learners who have to memorize these rules (which are never "natural" to them).

> > I always find it interesting that many people who learn English as a second language often understand and know the formal rules of the language better than those of us who've spoken it natively.

> I believe that's true for any natural language. To a native speaker, its rules are so natural (almost as breathing) that they hardly ever think about it. Frequently they don't even realize there's a question of picking the right form, because their brain does that job for them.

I personally rather think that most other languages have a much more complicated grammar than English. So many people learning English as second language are much more used to think of languages in terms of grammar. I, for example, also think of German (my native language) a lot in terms of grammar - OK, the reason might also be that I'm a really mathematical-minded person and heard some lectures about natural language processing (NLP), which further trained me in this kind of thinking (but I also remember that I already did so at the end of primary school).

I can say that some of the more obscure grammar rules of German are also not completely natural to many German speakers. But since in Germany at least in more educated circles there is a culture that using wrong grammar (as a native speaker) leaves a bad impression, you better know some rules to be able to explain why something was right or wrong. To give a common class examples, where a wrong dative instead of a correct genitive is used:

"dem Nachbar sein Sohn" (wrong, since for ownership you have to use a genitive and not a dative; roughly translated with "the neighbour his son"). Correct is "des Nachbars Sohn" ("the neighbour's son"; but this form sounds rather educated in German in opposite to English)

If you want to sound less stilted than "des Nachbars Sohn", you use "der Sohn des Nachbars" (Remark: if you want to troll Germans, ask them whether "der Sohn des Nachbars" or "der Sohn des Nachbarn" is correct. Answer is: both are, cf. http://www.duden.de/sprachwissen/sprachratgeber/beugung-von-...). This uses the correct genitive. Less educated people again use a wrong dative combined with "von": "der Sohn von dem Nachbarn", which is somewhere between very colloquial and wrong, because for ownership you use genitive (both examples would be translated with "the son of the neighbour" in English, but the distinction between these two constructions can't be expressed in English).

Another problem is that there exist some verbs that have a genitive object (these often sound very educated), among these is "gedenken" ("to commemorate"). Because these verbs are not used so often, many less educated people use them wrongly with a dative (which appears more natural, but is wrong). For example "ich gedenke den Verstorbenen" is wrong; correct is "ich gedenke der Verstorbenen" ("I commemorate the deceased", where this grammatical subtlety again cannot be expressed in English).

TLDR: I rather see two reasons: 1. Other languages have a more complicated grammar than English, so that native speakers of other languages think more in terms of grammar. 2. At least in Germany in educated circles there is a culture that using wrong grammar leaves a bad impression. So you better know the rules why something is right or wrong.

> Another problem is that there exist some verbs that have a genitive object (these often sound very educated), among these is "gedenken" ("to commemorate"). Because these verbs are not used so often, many less educated people use them wrongly with a dative (which appears more natural, but is wrong). For example "ich gedenke den Verstorbenen" is wrong; correct is "ich gedenke der Verstorbenen" ("I commemorate the deceased", where this grammatical subtlety again cannot be expressed in English).

I was never taught about such verbs and am glad to know about them, but I think you have a typo in your example; the mistaken dative form should be "dem Verstorbenen", not "den Verstorbenen".

den Verstorbenen is dative plural I think: dative singular would be dem Verstorben.

There seems to be an ambiguity about whether "the deceased" is meant as singular or plural.

Not if the word is "Verstorbenen", right? The extra -en makes it plural.

> Not if the word is "Verstorbenen", right? The extra -en makes it plural.

If we are in the nominative case this is correct. But

"des Verstorbenen": singular, male, genitive

"dem Verstorbenen": singular, male, dative

"den Verstorbenen": either (singular, male, accusative) or (plural, dative)

"die Verstorbenen" ("die" is always used in nominative plural): either (nominative, plural) or (accusative, plural)

In other words: the extra "-n" can be a plural ending or a case ending. Know your declination table inside out and you can find out.

If people are confused about why the oblique cases are all marked on the noun, which is usually not true for accusative and dative singular, "adjectives used as nouns" have weak adjective inflections (for example "für den Angeklagten" 'for the accused', "mit dieser Bekannten" 'with this (female) friend'); my source for this rule and the examples is the Collins German Concise Dictionary 4th ed., pp. 148-9.

This also seems to be the last point discussed in the 2nd paragraph of

https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Substantivierung#Allgemeines_2

which cites the Duden, which I unfortunately don't have.

> I was never taught about such verbs and am glad to know about them

As I said: Most of the verbs requiring a genitive object are erudite and sometimes sound old-fashioned. The most important ones are

verb + genitive object: bedürfen, erwehren (old-fashioned; you normally rather use "er wehrte sich gegen den Angriff" instead of "er erwehrte sich des Angriffs"), gedenken

verb + genitive object + accusative object: anklagen, beschuldigen, bezichtigen (a little old-fashioned), überführen, verdächtigen, zeihen (old-fashioned)

Pro tip: If you really want to write German texts that are supposed to sound ancient (for example when you write fantasy literature) combine verbs requiring genitive objects with the outdated genitives (mein, dein, sein, ihr) instead of (meiner, deiner, seiner, ihrer) of the personal pronouns (ich, du, er/es, sie (singular and plural)). For example:

"doch bei dem Ringe soll er mein gedenken" (I would translate this very loosely with "if he sees the ring he shall commemorate me")

(from the opera "Lohengrin" by Richard Wagner: http://www.rwagner.net/libretti/lohengrin/e-lohen-a3s3.html)

> the mistaken dative form should be "dem Verstorbenen", not "den Verstorbenen".

sbmassey explained it correctly. If you are really interested:

"der Verstorbenen" (genitive): either (female & singular) or plural

"dem Verstorbenen" (dative): (male & singular)

"den Verstorbenen" (dative)": plural

Thanks for the examples!

I was taking "deceased" as singular rather than plural (although it could have been either) so I parsed "den Verstorbenen" as the accusative singular rather than dative plural.

One of the struggles I had with German, as an English-speaker, was that I had to learn two things at once - German, and the structural and nomenclatural rules of grammar.

German vocabulary isn't necessarily the most complicated, since there are so many common root-words with English, and most of the rest is more-or-less logically constructed as compounds of simpler words. This was probably the easier of the two subjects.

However, much more difficult was learning the concept of different cases, genders, conjugations, subject-verb ordering rules, dependent and independent clauses, etc. In English, we just... don't really do that. I think I had done some super-basic sentence diagramming in English classes, but it was really not emphasised much, beyond the basics of "here's the subject, here's the verb, here's the object." Education about English grammar was woefully inadequate, bordering on non-existent, and without any background in Latin, the concepts of different cases, moods or tenses were, pardon the expression, Greek to me. So I was trying to both learn a foreign language, and the entire categorical system of language and grammar at the same time...

I hit this recently with the order of adjectives in English. I never knew this was a thing, and I had an expensive education.

For those who also missed it: We don't say "red big apple". We say "big red apple". There's a set of rules that govern this that we learn naturally but people learning English as a second language have to remember.

Yeah, any self-respecting high school student from Korea would know the rule. (Or at least they used to, back in the late 80s.)

Don't ask how well they fared when faced with an actual English speaker. :/

What is the rule here (I learned English as second language and I know that this ordering of adjectives is commonly used, but don't know the rule behind it)?

See here, for example: http://english.stackexchange.com/questions/1155/what-is-the-...

BTW, I learned English in school, too, but have never heard of such a rule. Still, I dare say I intuitively would follow this rule. At least all the "wrong" examples do look wrong to me.

> I don't think there is much controversy here, and the community recognizes the importance of adopting this language change (I read through the RFC and don't remember anyone against it, just differences on the scope of its meaning).

I'd read through it again. I see various people raising fundamental objections to adding the ? syntax for at least the following reasons:

- Not visually distinctive enough (easy to miss)

- Too visually distinctive (noisy, ugly)

- Unnecessary, try! is fine

- Prevents using the ? symbol for something else

- Should have a normal exception system instead (i.e. early return is implied on every call)

- Should have monadic bind syntax instead, like Haskell's do

Which is fine; when you invite everyone to express their opinion, you get a /lot/ of opinions. There was still a pretty broad consensus in favor.

The RFC: https://github.com/rust-lang/rfcs/pull/243

(note for anyone using 'search in page': the issue page hides hundreds of comments in the middle unless you click a button, which even then only reveals 200 at a time; search for "not shown")

You are right, though my reading was it that generally while those points were brought up, they were debated and there was consensus on direction. Perhaps my wording of no one "against" it was wrong, but generally the debate was good and came to a conclusive direction.

It's nice to not see something stagnate.

Russian (Russish, русский) language is example of success of artificial language.

It was language of books, used mainly in Orthodox churches, like Latin in Western Europe, but now it is spoken by hundreds of millions.

Hebrew has a similar story in Israel. [1]

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Revival_of_the_Hebrew_language

I speak both languages, and AFAIK neither is nearly as artificial as Volapuk or Esperanto.

That's certainly true. But they're both examples of a community collectively deciding to learn and speak a non-native language.

What language the Russians spoke at that time then?

Russians (Great Russians, Russish, русские, великоросы) were speaking their own native languages. For example, Putin is Uyghur. He is Russian and his native language is Russian, but Russian is not native language for Uyghurs.

The longer explanation:

There is three kinds of "Russians". Rus`, Rusyns, Russians.

Rus` lived at Baltic Sea. Rus` means "red". They were warriors, i.e. their life was to fight, trade, and collect taxes. Their native language is unknown (probably, Old Norse). At times of Great Epidemic, they left their city (now known as Old Russa, Старая Русса) and "concurred" South and started to govern it, so territory of current Ukraine got name "Rus`". Slavish colonists at these territories got name "Rusyns" (русины) (see below). At time of expansion of Rus`, North people was concurred and paid taxes to Rus` (Лаврентеевская летопись, ст 4. об. «А вот другие народы, дающие дань Руси: чудь, меря, весь, мурома, черемисы, мордва, пермь, печера, ямь, литва, зимигола, корсь, нарова, ливонцы, - эти говорят на своих языках, они - потомство Иафета, живущее в северных странах.»). They got name "Russish" (русские). This was time of "Great Rus`", so North Russians are also known as "Great Russians" (Великоросы), while South Russians (Slavs) are also known as "Little (Core) Russians" (Малоросы).

Summary:

  * Rus` - possibly warriors union or Varangians, native language (probably): Old Norse.
  * Rusyns (Ukrainians) - Slavish colonists governed by Rus`, native language: Slavish.
  * Russish (Russians) - native Europeans, native language: many, probably Finno-Ugric and others.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rus'_people

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Varangians

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Staraya_Russa

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ruthenia

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rus'_%28name%29#From_Rus.27_to...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Finno-Ugric_peoples

NOTE: -in, -yn, -an means "he/she" (modified "он" - "he"), -yny, -iny, -any, -ini, etc. - "they" (modified "они" - they) ("y" as in lynx). So Rysyn (русин) means "he is Rus`", Rysyny (русини) means "they are (people of) Rus`". Russians means "they are Russia", "россияне", but selfname of Russians is Russish ("русские").

Moreover, Russia is Greek name of Rus`, given by Catherine II (born in Prussia) to Moscovia, because Russia was used at West as name of past parts of Great Russia. Nikolai Kostomarov wrote something like "LOL, we are Russians now" at time of rename (ДЂло въ томъ, что названіе Руси укрЂпилось издревле за южнорусскимъ народомъ. Названіе не возникаетъ безъ факта. Нельзя навязать народу ни съ того, ни съ сего какое-нибудь имя. Это могло приходить въ голову только такимъ мудрецамъ, противъ которыхъ мы недавно писали (1) и которые намъ сообщили прекурьёзную новость, какъ Екатерина II, высочайшимъ повелЂніемъ, даровала Московскому народу имя Русскаго и запретила ему употреблять древнее свое имя — Московитяне.)

"At times of Great Epidemic,..."

The plague of 1770?

No. It was about 1 thousand of years earlier. Documents and recorded stories are referred to two major events, which caused to abandon cities and colonies: Great Epidemic, then army of White Ugric.

Thanks! Do you have a recommendation for learning more?

Sources about that period of colonization of Eastern Europe by Slavs are Greek (colonies in Crimea, Byzantine), then Arabic (traders), then Slavish (church chronicles, recorded stories). There are very few documents to read (few dozens only).

Would the Great Epidemic refer to Plague of Justinian?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plague_of_Justinian

That army of White Ugric sounds unfamiliar to me, what would that be? Perhaps the Finno-Ugric tribes who in 1087 raided and sacked Sigtuna, then capital of Swedes.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sigtuna

Yep, Great Epidemic ("Великий Мор") is Plague of Justinian. Army of White Ugric (Hungaries?) was in 898:

В год 6406 (898). Шли угры мимо Киева горою, которая прозывается теперь Угорской, пришли к Днепру и стали вежами: ходили они так же, как теперь половцы. И, придя с востока, устремились через великие горы, которые прозвались Угорскими горами, и стали воевать с жившими там волохами и славянами. Сидели ведь тут прежде славяне, а затем Славянскую землю захватили волохи. А после угры прогнали волохов, унаследовали ту землю и поселились со славянами, покорив их себе; и с тех пор прозвалась земля Угорской.

(Hungaries passed Kiev in 898).

-in is actually a a possessive suffix

мамин (mamin) - mother's кошкин дом (koshkin dom) - "Cat's house"

it also refers to people

болгарин (bolgarin) - Bulgarian боярин (boyarin) - boyar

the etymology of Rus is from Scandinavia, see Fin. Ruotsi "Sweden", Ruotsalainen "Swede"

And what is the etymology of Moscow, Yauza, and Oka, Volga and rivers... ?

Moscow comes from the locative на Москви (na Moskvi), while the original form is *Москы. It's using the locative because the hydronym (name of the river) is older than the name of the city. So the city comes from the name of the river.

Further, Lith. mazgóti "wash, splash", Latin mergō "dive"

Yauza probably from ya- and -(v)uz (vyazat' - to tie, bind, knit, uzel - knot) so maybe something like "the river that ties"

There are several etymologies for Oka, it probably has a form of oko (eye) in it, maybe from a Baltic source.

Volga has the same root as vlaga, vologa - "wetness"

I 90% sure that "Volga" means "(Vol) ... (Ga) Water/River", "Oka" means "(O) ... (Ka) Water/River", "Moskva" means "(Mos) ... (Kva) Water/River" in native language of people lived there, because "Kvas" means "Water".

kvas comes from kvasit' - to make sour

Yep, you are right.

-in, -yn, -ian, -an: "he"/"they".

-yaki, yaky, -aky: "which is/which are".

Pol - field, "farmer". Polyak - which is Pol (Western Slavs). Polyan - he is Pol (Eastern Slavs).

Moreover, Arab: ar - horse, ab - (one) of. Arab - one of riders.

I doubt that Putin is Uyghur, nor he looks like one. But, that's besides the point. Even if he was Uyghur, that would make him a member of a minority nation from Russia, who would speak Uyghur language as his mother tongue. I do not see the connection with the original post.

Russians speak the Russian language, its various local dialects, and were speaking it since it evolved from old (Proto)Slavic language(s). Of course it changed a lot during the millenia, but it is a natural language like any other major european language.

A bunch of closely related dialects, I suppose?

Russian is a bit like Sanskrit, a compilation of certain features of dialects spoken in different areas, so that the mix is mutually intelligible across them, without precisely matching any.

Isn't that true for any european language? There is a standard language and many local dialects that are more or less close to that standard. That doesn't make standard Italian, or standard German, or standard Russian, or any other standard language artificial, in the sense of Esperanto or Volapuk.

Not quite true, even texts from 1000 years ago are quite clearly intelligible to modern Russian speakers, unlike Beowulf to English speakers.

Latin texts from 2000 years ago are quite clearly intelligible to modern Latin speakers. ;-)

Not really intelligible to Italian speakers that didn't study any Latin. Italian lacks noun cases.

BUT, modern Russian still retains noun cases, multiple verb conjugations, rich aspect system, etc. that typifies Old Russian texts

There is no "Old Russian" language. You are talking about Old Church Slavonic language which is created by Saints Cyril and Methodius to translate Bible.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Old_Church_Slavonic

PS.

Quote from (English) Wikipedia:

The official language in Moscow and Novgorod, and later, in the growing Muscovy, was Church Slavonic, which evolved from Old Church Slavonic and remained the literary language for centuries, until the Petrine age, when its usage became limited to biblical and liturgical texts. Russian developed under a strong influence of Church Slavonic until the close of the 17th century; afterward the influence reversed, leading to corruption of liturgical texts.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_language

Wrong, Russians spoke the Old Russian language.

Слово о плъкоу Игоревѣ was written in Old Russian.

Old Church Slavonic is a different thing.

There is no such thing as "Old Russian". "Слово о плъкоу Игоревѣ" is written in "folk language", which then evolved to Ukrainian language.

That's what Old Russian is - the language of Kievan Rus and related dialects.

But Latin had a (or really many depending on era and style) written form and a spoken form (vulgate). My understanding is that the vulgate is quite similar to some Italian regional dialects, although not to standard Italian (itself a postwar construct)

> Volapük was a hybrid of English, German, and French

I found this funny, because that's basically what English is.

English is more of a mongrel than that even, there are substantial additions from Latin and Greek as well.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Origins_of_English_PieCha...

Name any (natural) language that's "pure". English is hardly unique in that respect.

No languages are pure, although some languages in modern times have official national bodies trying to keep them as 'pure' as possible (like French), they're still not 'pure' in any way.

But English is especially hybrid. Some think that contributed to it's global popularity as a second language, but I think it's probably more just a coincidence that England and then the U.S. were such global powers, and not related to characteristics of English.

> I think it's probably more just a coincidence that England and then the U.S. were such global powers, and not related to characteristics of English

... and if you want to argue otherwise, you will have to explain why russian had such good linguistic characteristics in east-europe between 1945 and 1989, and not so much since then :)

That's a very aptly named PIE chart.

Esperanto seems to have learned its lesson and made itself un-changable, but forkable.

> The only basis of the Esperanto language binding on all Esperantists, which no one has the right to change, is the little work Foundation of Esperanto. If anyone deviates from the rules and models given in the said work, he can never justify himself with the words "thus desires or advises the author of Esperanto".

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modern_evolution_of_Esperanto

Changing the language too much is "kontraŭ fundamento"

I have seen complaints about "aeroporto" vs. "flugaveno" (?) though.

"Flughaveno" (flight-port). Similarly "flugmaŝino" (flight-machine) has generally disappeared for "aviadilo" (sort of "aviation-er"). Some of the vocabulary has drifted with technological and social changes. For example "svati," to matchmake, this has pretty much disappeared. But the grammar has changed very little.

> there was another constructed language which once claimed nearly a million followers, making it the most popular constructed language of all time

Maybe a nitpick, but Esperanto (which essentially replaced Volapuk) is estimated to have around 2 to 10 million speakers and is generally considered to be the most common constructed language now [1].

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Esperanto

Fall of languages is not bad thing. For example, without the fall of Volapük, it's very possible that Esperanto would not have taken off, since much of the early growth of Esperanto was a result of Volapük speakers looking for a new constructed language.

If a community lacks reasoning, that is the real issue, not major battles, which might just means there is in fact a valid reasoning to split the community.

Keeping a community together just for the sake of doing so is a recipe for failure.

Language home page: http://volapük.com/

I'm fluent in English, know a fair bit of German and some very basic French and I can't understand any Volapük. If Europe's ever going to speak the same language it's going to be through the languages growing closer, eliminating different spellings of existing loanwords and creating new ones that are universal. None of the knowledge I have of European languages carry over to Volapük, at least in terms of vocabulary. That, to me, looks like a mistake on Volapük's part.

You would probably have a very different experience with Interlingua.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interlingua

(The weirdest thing for me about it as a Latin and Portuguese speaker is that adjectives aren't inflected for number, so you have phrases like "servicios tangibile" and "contributiones actual", which sound kind of bizarre throughout the Romance milieu, where the adjectives would have to be pluralized too.)

You can see some sample texts at

http://www.interlingua.com/

or for example

http://www.interlingua.com/libros/

Interlingua is very Latin and Romance-heavy, so if your experience is more with German, it may not feel as familiar, but it's almost sure to be easier than Volapük for anyone familiar with multiple European languages. :-)

> Interlingua is very Latin and Romance-heavy, so if your experience is more with German, it may not feel as familiar, but it's almost sure to be easier than Volapük for anyone familiar with multiple European languages. :-)

Well, if at least one of those multiple European languages is a Romance tongue, sure. But if someone speaks fluent Manx, English, Icelandic and Norwegian, he'll probably have more than a little trouble with it …

It would definitely be quite a bit harder, but all of those languages will have had some degree of Latin and Romance borrowing so they'll still confer at least a little benefit.

Well, there's also the fact that Volapuk is rather hideous and imports most of the worst features of its source languages wholesale. Nouns and pronouns inflect into multiple cases (genetive, dative, accusative...), verbs have literally thousands of conjugations, gender is retained, etc. Even Esperanto is often accused of Latin bias, but Volapuk takes this to a whole new (well, old) level.

At the time Latin was as universal in Europe as English is today. The Eulers and Newtons and Descartes spoke latin, in fact you can read it, today: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philosophi%C3%A6_Naturalis_Pri...

Later German became the language of the philosophers and scientists and English the language of the practical engineering.

English was not or is not gradually becoming a universal language, but suddenly after the US of A won the WWII(and everybody else lost, for example British lost their empire).

After the war the US banned all scientific knowledge in German, and forced the use of English. Remember they took half the scientists of Germany with them(that later created their space program), the other half were taken by the Russians.

In (inland)Europe we used to measure height of a plane over ground in meters before and during WWII. Kilometers for horizontal distance. When (North)Americans won it became the ruler of the world and imposed horizontal distance in miles, and height in feet.

I speak several languages because I love to travel and it is completely different when you speak the native language. It is not a good idea or polite to only speak one language thinking that people should talk your language because it is "universal", which usually means your country has intelligent nuclear weapons and drones that can draw any other country on their knees(or so you believe).

What I mean is that any empire will end, like any other empire has ended in the past, and things change over time.

I believe the Universal language of the future will be machines translating with small delay and helping people learn other languages much faster.

> It is not a good idea or polite to only speak one language thinking that people should talk your language because it is "universal", which usually means your country has intelligent nuclear weapons and drones that can draw any other country on their knees(or so you believe).

What's not polite is being prejudiced against an entire continent of people you've never met. If I happen to ask whether you speak English, I'm probably just trying to find the cheese aisle.

This is certainly relevant for Lisp programmers:

"Contrarily, major schisms or breakdowns in the relationships and development of a language and its community are big warning signs that should make you think twice about the future of a language."

Related reading includes "The Lisp Curse":

http://www.winestockwebdesign.com/Essays/Lisp_Curse.html

And note that "Why Lisp Did Not and Never Will Gain Enough Traction" offers this alternative explanation:

"Since there is so little pre choice, the glue that is supposed to hold a community together is too weak to draw enough people that would build up a momentum."

http://kresimirbojcic.com/2012/08/14/why-lisp-did-not-and-ne...

Those are definitely some interesting ideas, but I'm uncertain to what extent they're actually true. I think that Common Lisp really does make choices for its programmers, and asks that they develop in a fashion such that their code can easily live with others (notably, the places where it doesn't — e.g. the common readtable — are nowadays regarded as mistakes). One of my several issues with Scheme is that historically it has made so few choices ('you have lists — develop whatever data structures you need!' & 'you have call/cc — develop whatever control structures you need!'). But that's a problem of Scheme (less so, in recent years), not of Lisp or the closely-related (to Scheme) Racket.

There is definitely something to be said about how easy it is to get things done in Lisp: 'Making Scheme object-oriented is a sophomore homework assignment. On the other hand, adding object orientation to C requires the programming chops of Bjarne Stroustrup' (from The Lisp Curse).

But as an author of the Slovianski pan-Slavic language, I don't feel like this is a bad thing. Everyone who contributes on the forum has their own dialect:

http://s8.zetaboards.com/Slovianski/forum/38184/

I prefer merging y and i, for example (although I don't always follow it myself, I experiment a lot)

Citing the perl 6 fork leading to the decline of the whole language(s) is very interesting. What the author doesn't know is that not only perl6 forked off, also 4 other perl5 forks appeared during the last year, which is a strong sign of an already dying community and language. I'm one of the forkers (cperl).

For me forking was a necessity since the perl5 community was not able to come up with any improvement at all since the author left 15 years ago. It rather managed to erode the codebase and the management (the perl5 "asshole" problem). "Faith" into the developers capabilities is a now a mandatory code of conduct point, even if the said devs did nothing to prove their capabilities in the last 15 years. Using religious arguments to hold people together might have worked in the middle ages and in a post-modern community. (perl is one, go figure).

On the contrary the perl 6 and perl 5 leaders are making cynical jokes about their future, to the end that a new backend or a new fork will make the language and the community stronger. (https://youtu.be/gmmVGPdcItM 2016 - "The Ongoing Disaster That Is Perl 5‎" - Ricardo Signes) Which is of course wrong. We don't need Volapük and the Kerckhoff fork to show this.

There are many bad examples in the BSD land, the latest DragonflyBSD, and many more on debian forks.

Now to the arguments why to fork:

* perl5 argues that forking (experiments) are good, and if successful will lead to "stealing" the good parts.

This never happened so far with perl5. They rather blocked competing forks to submit bugfixes and discuss critical failures upstream. While the forks manage to enhance security, performance and add many wanted features (which were not added in the last 15 years since they were designed by perl6), upstream did nothing. It didn't even merge the security fixes.

If a community is that broken, it needs to fork to be able to survive.

However with parrot, the perl6 backend, it worked fine. The unfriendly fork (MoarVM) eventually replaced parrot, using a much simpler architecture. This was an easy fork, because they could simply replace it upstream. No need to persuade the community to switch over.

* If a product is broken beyond repair, make a new one. People will switch eventually.

Do people use better ssl libraries over openssl? Some do, but most don't. E.g for perl there's not a single TLS library binding other than to OpenSSL/NetSSLeay. No boringssl, no libressl, no PolarSSL (mbed TLS), no NSS. For crypto no libsodium.

Did HHVM survive? Well, the php devs eventually got off its ass and made an ever better version with PHP7. They didn't steal much, they rather re-architectured the whole mess. This is the best example of a successful fork which strengthened everybody. Pressure. The GCC fork under schmorp to use the new intel Pentium intrinsics was also eventually successful.

I cannot say much about Python 3, only that the inherent VM problems where not solved at all and only the forks (pypy, Graal, mypy) are able to overcome that technical debt partially. ruby has it's number of forks but is still paying for it's ruby on rails meta-architecture disaster.

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