Schleyer, J: Volapük -

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Résumé :
Excerpt from Volap?k: An Easy Method of Acquiring the Universal Language; Constructed by Johann Martin Schleyer, Prepared for the English-Speaking Public on the Basis of Alfred Kirchhoff's Hilfbuch

The committee further finds that the Volapiik grammar meets gener ally its requirements for simplicity, being without irregularities or ex ceptions and one which can be mastered in a few hours' study. There is no trouble over genders, declensions, comparisons or coniugations all are simple, uniform and regular. But and here the committee strikes what at first sight appears as the greatest mistake of the inventor in direct con?ict with what the universal language must and should be, the in?ections are synthetic, instead of, as is the trend of modern word building, analytic. This objection has been made over and over again by linguists and philologists but, as Prof. Kerckhofi's says, an attentive study of the grammar convinced me that a form less synthetic would have conaiderabl y augmented the'difiiculties, and this objection is at bot tom more plausible than well-founded. The analytical form of our modern languages is the product, not of a certain tendency of the mind towards this or that exterior form of thought, but a simple displacement of the tonic accent, or, to speak more clearly, of the loss of the intensity of the secondary in favor of the principal accent.

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