[PW] English to ???

[Jon George]

Andrew Drummond's new (2006) novel "A handbook of Volapuk" crossed my
desk recently and brings the artificial language of Volapuk to mind.
Invented by a German, it has German influences and utilizes umlauts.

Appendix D of Mark Twain's "A tramp abroad" contains a discussion of the
German language "The awful German language" and at the tail end has a
short piece written in combined English and German.  Find it online at:
http://www.cs.utah.edu/~gback/awfgrmlg.html

Jon George

-----Original Message-----
From: project-wombat-fm-bounces at lists.project-wombat.org
[mailto:project-wombat-fm-bounces at lists.project-wombat.org] On Behalf Of
David Payne
Sent: Thursday, June 12, 2008 10:34 PM
To: Project Wombat
Subject: [PW] English to ???



>From a friend of a friend:

Got a call from a patron today looking for a story that he read about 20
years ago. However, he said the story was not a new one of that time,
just that's when he read it. He cannot remember the title or author but
gave this description.

It's an essay or short story. It starts in English and progresses to
tell how a language might be changed by substituting a letter or symbol
for a letter we have in English. As the story goes on the author is
subtly changing the letters to the symbols or new letters he has
discussed so that by the end of the story you (the reader) are actually
reading this "new" language that has morphed from English. He strongly
thinks the "new" language is German or is similar to German. He also has
a vague notion that it might have been written by Samuel Clemens but
says that is very vague and could be totally wrong.

At first I thought he was describing Ella Minnow Pea but as he went on I
realized that story does not meet his description. Also, it wasn't
written too long ago. Does anyone have any idea what he is talking
about?

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