4 replies to this topic

[Aghaster]

Here

Quite an interesting and funny article about Volapük and why it failed. I thought I might shared it.

[notyourtim]

Curiously, the plot of William Gibson's latest novel "Spook Country" involves the use of Volapük by Russian speakers trying to cope with Latin alphabet keyboards.

(FYI, W. Gibson is the author who is credited with coining the term "cyberspace"; an achievement that apparently won him the dubious honor of being name-dropped in the movie "Hackers".)

[Aghaster]

Curiously, the plot of William Gibson's latest novel "Spook Country" involves the use of Volapük by Russian speakers trying to cope with Latin alphabet keyboards.

(FYI, W. Gibson is the author who is credited with coining the term "cyberspace"; an achievement that apparently won him the dubious honor of being name-dropped in the movie "Hackers".)

Eh, that's a pretty weird appearance of Volapük. Why would russian speakers try to cope with latin alphabet keyboard using Volapük? This makes no sense to me...

Btw, mi parolas esperanton, do se vi volas skribi esperante mi gxojos respondi

I'm just curious, does anybody speak Volapük in here? I'd be surprised if anybody did.
However, I noticed something really weird. The Volapük wikipedia has 111 974 articles, and the Esperanto one 88 825 articles.
The article about volapük says there are about 20-30 Volapük speakers actually. Esperanto has an estimated number of speakers between 100 000 and 2 000 000.
What the fuck?

Edited by Aghaster, 16 September 2007 - 09:08 PM.

[notyourtim]

Eh, that's a pretty weird appearance of Volapük. Why would russian speakers try to cope with latin alphabet keyboard using Volapük? This makes no sense to me...

I think the idea was that the Russian speakers possessed only Latin keyboards for some unexplained reason and were therefore spelling out Russian words using Volapuk's phonetic system for writing particular sounds with particular Latin characters. Actually, they were texting with phones IIRC. I had never heard of Volapuk at the time I was reading so I didn't pause to think about it. Does this scenario make any sense?

[Aghaster]

Eh, that's a pretty weird appearance of Volapük. Why would russian speakers try to cope with latin alphabet keyboard using Volapük? This makes no sense to me...

I think the idea was that the Russian speakers possessed only Latin keyboards for some unexplained reason and were therefore spelling out Russian words using Volapuk's phonetic system for writing particular sounds with particular Latin characters. Actually, they were texting with phones IIRC. I had never heard of Volapuk at the time I was reading so I didn't pause to think about it. Does this scenario make any sense?

yeah... I think Volapük's alphabet can handle Russian sounds. However, there is already many adaptations of Russian to the Latin alphabet. I don't see why they would think of Volapük first...

Edited by Aghaster, 21 September 2007 - 05:36 PM.