German, roughly like English end, fern, über. C is pronounced like English j or ch, and j like English sh, or like the s in English "usually". is pronounced after voiced consonants, for example bs, ds, gs, ls, as plural -s is in English. R was not found in the original proposal. The letters ä, ö, and ü do not have alternative forms such as the ae, oe, and ue of German, but Schleyer proposed alternate forms ꞛ, ꞝ, and ꞟ for them, all of which are part of Unicode since version 7.0 released in June 2014: There are no diphthongs; each vowel letter is pronounced separately. Special consonantal letters The author Alfred A. Post mentions in his Comprehensive Volapük Grammar some additional letters created by Schleyer: And the following letters are constructed by the inventor to designate sounds which occasionally occur – Most of these letters can already be found in Unicode: () () (for composing m̂ and n̂) () Letter r Some phonemes, such as ö and ü , were not avoided, despite being uncommon. Schleyer's 1880 Volapük as well as Modern Volapük has minimal l–r pairs such as rel "religion" versus lel "iron". Syllabic stress Polysyllabic words are always stressed on the final vowel; for example, neai "never" is pronounced . (However, the question clitic "-li" does not affect the stress of the word it attaches to.) Where there is secondary stress, as is found in the compounding of several roots together, it is found on the final syllable between the roots. Vocabulary Schleyer adapted the vocabulary mostly from English, with a smattering of German and French. Some words remain readily recognizable for a speaker of one of the source languages, but many others are modified beyond easy recognition. For instance, vol and pük are derived from the English words world and speak. Although unimportant linguistically, and regardless of the simplicity and consistency of the stress rule, these deformations were greatly mocked by the language's detractors. It seems to have been Schleyer's intention, however, to alter its loan words in such a way that they would be hard to recognise, thus losing their ties to the languages (and, by extension, nations) from which they came. Conversely, Esperanto and Interlingua are commonly criticized as being much easier to learn for Europeans than for those with non-European native languages. Grammar The grammar is based on that of typical European