Okskilükam

Hint, hint: If you pronounce the words carefully and think germanic, you'll often get a pleasant surprise while trying to figure out a Volapük word. (Watch out for that j; you've probably never heard it pronounced as Volapükänans do!) And also remember that as part of the word derivation process, vowels and consonants at the beginnings and/or ends of roots were sometimes swapped to make sure that roots begin and end with consonants.

a as in English father ä as in English gate c as in English church e as in English get g as in English get h as in English house

i as in English feet j as in English shoe ö as in German ökonomisch u as in English fool ü as in German Büro z as in English bats

This is a JavaScript implementation of a simple program that I wrote in Visual Basic a long time ago for my own use. It's rather ugly inside because most of the files are created by a makefile and I didn't worry too much about pretty formatting of the generated code. Also, I wanted it to run in just about any browser that supports JavaScript, so I tried not to do anything too fancy... and that ruled out some Webby tools that could have made the code, and the appearance of the pages, more elegant. (It's amazing how differently different browsers (and even different versions of the same browser) handle (or don't) even simple CSS and JavaScript features. Hopefully it will work on your machine too. If not, it shouldn't be too hard to fix.) And I've copied and hacked it for several different languages, so if you look inside the source code you'll find traces of them. This code has been tested with Opera 3.62 and 5.10, Internet Explorer 5.0 and Netscape Navigator 4.75; though it doesn't look quite as I'd like in all of them, at least it does work!

Most of the words were drawn from Ralph Midgley's compilation. All would have been too many for my purpose; I wanted a useful subset. So I included words most frequently used (according to various sources), along with illustrative groups of related words, whether or not all are frequently met.

Things may change, but for now, here's how the pages work: The field at the upper left contains a word. The three fields at the right contain suggested translations for that word, only one of which is correct. Your task is to click on the correct translation. The remaining field is used to keep track of your score, which can be zeroed via the restart button. And the reverse button reverses the direction of the translation. That's all there is to it. Enjoy! (If you'd like to work offline: download this file, unzip it into a local directory, then crank up your browser and open index.htm to begin.)