An Egalitarian Volpük

Charles Ezra Sprague

Charles Sprague, the chief Volapükist in the United States[1] was clearly delighted with one decision of the 1887 Volapük congress in Munich: they dropped a pronoun, specifically, the second person formal. From Sprague’s report, most people were content with the second person in singular and plural forms.

I've glanced at other Volpük materials by Sprague from the same time period. While an advocate for Volapük, he was certainly unsparing in his criticism. By 1889, he was questioning Schleyer's use of umlauts (pointing out, for example, that even Germans didn't make a distinction between i and ü). Thus, without the umlaut, the name of the language would be pronounced the same if it were named "Volapik." Sprague would later offer the postmortem for Volapük in the American press.

The article ran in something called the Home Journal, and then reprinted in the Fort Worth Daily Gazette on October 5, 1887. They liked it so much that they used it two days later in the Fort Worth Weekly Gazette of October 7, 1888.

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