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Brief Description
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Invented by Johann Martin Schleyer, a Catholic priest in Baden, Volapük was the first constructed language to achieve some success. Its aim was to provide a neutral medium for international exchange. A description of the language was published in 1880, and hundreds of Volapük societies soon grew up. The language, though completely agglutinative and regular, was very complex, with a nominal case system and verbs which marked person, gender, number, tense, mood and voice. Perhaps because of this complexity, it ultimately failed, though it provided a foundation for the Esperanto movement that shortly followed.
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