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   The Public Domain Review (publicdomainrev@mastodon.social)'s status on Thursday, 27-Nov-2025 21:48:01 JST The Public Domain Review

   During one sleepless night in 1879, German priest Johann Schleyer felt a Divine presence telling him to create a universal language. The result was Volapük. @ArikaOkrent explores the rise + fall of the first invented language to gain widespread success: https://publicdomainreview.org/essay/truth-beauty-and-volapuk

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     Mike P (fentiger@mastodon.social)'s status on Thursday, 27-Nov-2025 22:11:40 JST Mike P

     in reply to

     @publicdomainrev Mötley Crüe should make an album in this language.

     (Odd that their Wikipedia page doesn't have a section titled "Umlauts", actually...)

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     HighlandLawyer (highlandlawyer@mastodon.social)'s status on Thursday, 27-Nov-2025 23:43:31 JST HighlandLawyer

     in reply to

     @publicdomainrev Volapük and Esperanto respectively demonstrate the difference between proprietary versus open source. Schleyer insisted he owned the language, and that it would develop how and when he said; Zamenhof created rules on how the language can be developed to ensure backwards compatibility, then handed it over to its users.

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     Matthew Newell (matthewnewell@mastodon.social)'s status on Friday, 28-Nov-2025 02:33:04 JST Matthew Newell

     in reply to

     @publicdomainrev

     It's also the name adopted (because it's an invented language) by Russians for Cyrillic written with Latin characters and Arabic Numerals on mobile phones for texting before there was easy access to smart phones with interchangeable virtual keyboards.