Etymology
The name Volapuk encoding comes from the constructed language Volapük, for two reasons. Cyrillic text written in this way looks strange and often funny, just as a Volapük-language text may appear. At the same time, the word "Volapük" ("Волапюк/Воляпюк" Volapük/Voläpük in Russian) itself sounds funny to Russian ears, so the name stuck.
The term was popularized by its use in the first Soviet commercially-available UUCP and TCP/IP network, RELCOM (a typical networking software package included Cyrillic KOI-8 to Volapuk transcoding utilities called tovol and fromvol, originally implemented by Vadim Antonov), making it the likely origin of the usage of Volapuk as applied to Cyrillic encoding.
Read more about this topic: Volapuk Encoding
Famous quotes containing the word etymology:
“Semantically, taste is rich and confusing, its etymology as odd and interesting as that of “style.” But while style—deriving from the stylus or pointed rod which Roman scribes used to make marks on wax tablets—suggests activity, taste is more passive.... Etymologically, the word we use derives from the Old French, meaning touch or feel, a sense that is preserved in the current Italian word for a keyboard, tastiera.”
—Stephen Bayley, British historian, art critic. “Taste: The Story of an Idea,” Taste: The Secret Meaning of Things, Random House (1991)
“The universal principle of etymology in all languages: words are carried over from bodies and from the properties of bodies to express the things of the mind and spirit. The order of ideas must follow the order of things.”
—Giambattista Vico (1688–1744)