Weltdeutsch

Wilhelm Ostwald, creator of Weltdeutsch.

Wilhelm Ostwald was born a Baltic German in Riga, and thus was raised multilingual in Latvian, German, and Russian. Although best known as the 1909 German laureate of the Nobel Prize in Chemistry, Ostwald had a long relationship with Interlinguistics, being first introduced to the science as a Volapükologist by Arthur von Oettingen at the University of Tartu[2] He later became a member of the Delegation for the Adoption of an International Auxiliary Language at the behest of one of its founders, Louis Couturat (later cocreator of Ido) in October 1903, and later chaired it in 1907 when it introduced Ido, shattering the Esperanto movement.

For the majority of his time as a proponent of an international language, Ostwald was an Idist, remaining a proponent of the language after the dissolution of the Delegation, although he spent much time as an Esperantist; Having been invited to be one of Harvard University's visiting scholars by Hugo Münsterberg, advertising Esperanto to the point of founding 100 Esperanto clubs across the country[3], and remarking while visiting the Louisiana Purchase Exposition:

"Da standen die Männer nebeneinander, die sich gegenseitig das Belangreichste zu sagen hatten, aber sie konnten sich nicht verständigen. Denn wenn die meisten Gelehrten und Praktiker heute auch mehrere Sprachen soweit beherrschen, dass sie Fachabhandlungen lesen können, so ist es doch von diesem Punkte noch eine weite und mühsame Reise zum mündlichen Verkehr in der fremden Sprache. So entstand aus der Not der Gedanken der internationalen Sprache von neuem."[4]

English translation:

"The men who had the most important things to tell each other stood there, but they could not understand one another. Even if most of today's scholars and practitioners have mastered several languages to the point of being able to read technical papers, it is still a long and arduous journey hence to the point of oral communication in the foreign language. So, out of these distressing thoughts, arose the idea of an international language once again."

Oswald eventually left Esperanto for Ido for several reasons, including issues with Esperanto orthography, the irregularities in its grammar, but most importantly the "blind fanaticism often attached to religious movements."[5] Aside from Ido, Ostwald also joined Peano's Academia pro Interlingua, supporting Latino sine flexione.[6]

During the First World War, German nationalism propagated even amongst pacifist and internationalist circles, but especially in the Monistic movement in Germany founded by Ernst Haeckel during the early 20th century, of which Oswald was heavily committed to.[7] During the early parts of the war, victory was viewed with optimism, so arose the question of the common language of the German colonial empire. Being a signatory of the Manifesto of the Ninety-Three, Oswald, amongst other means, expressed this newfound nationalism through the creation of his Weltdeutsch,[8][9] a simplified form of German with the goal of easing learning of the language in countries to be conquered by Germany.[10] Languages (aside from earlier projects under the names of Weltdeutsch, such as those by Liechtenstein or Schultz) created for chauvinistic reasons had already existed: according to Detlev Blanke, Elias Molee's Tutonish falls under this category.[11]

The front cover of the second volume of Ostwald's Monistiche Sonntagspredigten.

In 1916, Ostwald published Monistic Sunday Sermons 36 (German: Monistische Sonntagspredigten), wherein he introduced the language in a chapter entitled "Weltdeutsch":

Outside of the work published in Monistische Sonntagspredigten, little is known about the language; Ostwald may have left it simply as theory, and it never developed or was put in practise.[12]

Arguing that the "pointless squandering of energy that lies in the multiplicity and irregularity of older linguistic forms" had a need to be eliminated[13], his language included reforms such as a simplification in phonology and orthography, simplifying the use of grammatical gender in the language to one article ("de"[12], as in Dutch), and the removal of the sounds <ä>, <ö>, and <ü>, corresponding to the phonemes [ɛ], [ɛ], and [ʏ], as well as the multigraphs <sh>, <sch>, with the digraph <ts> replaced with <z>.

Weltdeutsch forms part of a continuum of simplified and regularised constructed languages; other examples in a similar vein include Swedish engineer August Nilson's 1897 Lasonebr, Felix Lenz's Pasilingua Hebraica, French judge Raoul de la Grasserie's 1907 Apolema, and Serafin Bernhard's Lingua franca nuova[14].

Weltdeutsch was met with disappointment from the interlinguistic community - Ostwald was shortly met by a letter from colleague Leopold Pfaundler, who had contributed to Ostwald's 1911 book International Language and Science, in which Pfaundler wrote:

"Your suggestion of a world German not only seems to be inconsistent with our prior approach and an act of ingratitude, but also entirely hopeless with respect to feasibility. Thus I am making an appeal to you not to continue the plan further, granting us moreover in this besieged time your exceedingly valuable continued cooperation as well. I remain despite the war in contact with Swedish and Danish Idists and dins everywhere the greatest willingness to cooperate. We must advance the work from these neutral states and Switzerland, and not let it slumber."[13][15]

• Gordin, Michael D. (2015). "The Wizards of Ido". Scientific Babel : how science was done before and after global English. Chicago. ISBN 978-0-226-00029-9. OCLC 887849423.
• Kosuch, Carolin, ed. (2020-08-24). Freethinkers in Europe: National and Transnational Secularities, 1789−1920s. De Gruyter. doi:10.1515/9783110688283. ISBN 978-3-11-068828-3.