I am more inclined to think that even in the early community, Esperanto speakers valued language stability over constant attempts to improve and reform the language.

I suspect that the initial Esperanto community saw what happened to Volapük (no consensus on where to take the language, creator trying to monopolise the rights to his creation) and decided that they needed to steer clear of division in order not to go down the same path, even at the cost of some potential personal dissatisfaction.

Few people remember it today, but Volapük's downfall was truly spectacular, if it is true that, at one point, it had over a quarter million active speakers and dozens of publications. Yet if this collapse hadn't happened, Esperanto couldn't have learned from the Volapük community's errors.

As someone who enjoys inventing his own conlangs and tinkering with things in general, I used to think it was a pity that certain minor elements of Ido (and certain Esperantidos) couldn't have been incorporated into EO proper, while preserving almost the entire Fundamento. But as you say, someone will always find flaws with whatever model is proposed.

Besides, Esperanto has become a living language over the past century and now behaves more or less like a "natural" language. To propose changes to it at this stage would be as inappropriate as proposing substantive changes to English.

(I do have a personal modified Esperanto which I sometimes like to use when scribbling notes for myself on paper, simply because it looks more aesthetic to me. Of course, whenever I interact with Esperantujo, I always use the "real thing". )

acdibble:They weren't all created by a bot. I created the pages on Earth, Mars, Saturn, the Sun, and the solar system.

My error, I should have said "virtually all". (I actually created an article or two over there as well.) But based on my analysis, there are at best several hundred articles written by hand, and few of those are longer than a few paragraphs. Certainly, it's not an encouraging indication of the Volapük community's size.

I always feel slightly disappointed that I couldn't use Ido in as many contexts as Esperanto. I have only briefly read about differences between Esperanto and Ido (the link is well worth the read imho) and I have made no attempt to learn it but it does seem like an improvement I would welcome. For me, it will always seem like the time to solidify the definition of Esperanto was after professional linguists gave it a once-over.

But a lot of unnecessary baggage was also introduced, negating the simplifications and actually making language more confusing.

I don't think anyone can claim this and not be obviously and poorly rationalising their use of Esperanto over Ido, and I say that as someone who doesn't and probably won't use Ido. It might be arguable that some changes have introduced some small degree of unnecessary complexity, but I don't think anyone can reasonably say it is equal to or greater than the benefits.

That said, I would never dream of arguing that Esperanto should be abandoned in favour of Ido at this stage.

For instance: no more 1:1 letter-sound correspondence

Never understood this objection. Is "ch" and "sh" so difficult to grasp? It doesn't seem to be given that it's used by many Esperantists, in addition to the "sx" and "cx" convention used on this very website.

irregular word accentuation

I don't understand the motivation for this change but it seems to be a) unimportant and b) not difficult to learn, especially given how obvious it is when a word is an infinitive.

The accent or stress falls on the last syllable but one for all words except infinitives which are stressed on the last syllable... When a word ends in a vowel preceded by i or u, the two vowels at the end of the word count as one syllable.

Source

removal of mal- prefix (resulting in many new roots to learn).

Ido includes "des" as an exact replacement for "mal". As far as I'm aware, one can even use "desbona" and be correct despite the shorter alternative "mala".

The prefix mal- in Esperanto is particularly inopportune because in several languages 'mal' means 'bad' or 'wrong' (as in English 'malformed', 'malodorous' etc). Ido has the international prefix des- (similar to English dis- as in 'disappear'). Although such a prefix is very useful, Esperanto uses it to excess, so making many very common words unnecessarily long.

Esperanto - Ido - English
malbona - mala - bad
malfermas - apertas - open(s)
malgranda - mikra - small

Source

It might be arguable that some changes have introduced some small degree of unnecessary complexity, but I don't think anyone can reasonably say it is equal to or greater than the benefits.

You raise good points. The difference in difficulty is not great, and most of the alterations, as you point out, are minor. But it adds up, especially if you are not fluent in a Romance language or English.

EO is already criticised for being too Euro-centric for an international language. I'd like to suggest that Ido's changes are easy and look natural to a European because the European expects to see these sort of spellings and accentuations. But everyone else (primarily people from the Far East) is at a disadvantage. For Chinese/Japanese speakers, the Latin alphabet and completely new vocabulary already gives them a steeper learning curve. At least with EO, you know that once you learn a spelling/pronunciation rule, you'll never have to worry about exeptions.

Maybe compounds like mal-san-ul-ej-o look ugly to the European eye, but they drastically cut down on the number of roots you need to memorise. In Esperanto, if you know the 800 most common roots and the affixes to go along with them, you can have a reasonably advanced conversation on almost any topic. I doubt the same could be said of most other languages.

There are a few other gripes I have about Ido, such as the correlative table losing its regularity and the practice of adding -al when making adjectives out of nouns (metalo -> metalala, geometrio -> geometriala). Again, I don't actually dislike Ido, to the contrary I think it's a great international language. I just think EO is easier to learn and therefore more suited to this task.

I'm not totally convinced that someone being a professional linguist makes a better developer of a planned language than a talented amateur who spends a lot of time and thought on it (and devotes years to experimentation, as Zamenhof did).

It's a little like saying that just because someone has a university degree in music, they write better music than someone without any particular music education, but with inherent talent. I'm not really convinced that Mozart or Beethoven could have written better music if only they'd gone to school and gotten a degree in it.

Every constructed language requires some trade-offs and sacrifices. You can agree or disagree with how far to go with each particular trade-off and compromise, and I wouldn't have done it necessarily like Zamenhof did. But in general I think he made very good decisions.

With regard to the alphabet, for example, the Ido link you mentioned cited some words that Esperanto 'mangles'. Zamenhof cleverly used a combination of spelling and pronunciation to make words recognizable to people from different linguistic backgrounds - some people would recognize the spelling, others, the pronunciation. He sometimes changed a letter in a root to reduce the number of words with 'double' meanings'. You can agree or disagree with these decisions, but they were done for a specific reason, which wasn't simply inattention or carelessness or lack of linguistic education.

Ido generally takes the view that "more like Romance languages = better", and I personally disagree with that; but I do agree that Ido is a better choice for people who agree with that statement. But then I wonder, if you want it to be more like a Romance language, why not go for one of the more naturalistic Romance-based languages? That may be part of Ido's problem, it's clearly in the camp of "Romance = better", and it includes a few naturalistic elements, but it perhaps doesn't go far enough towards naturalism if that's really what it wants to do (or perhaps Interlingua has already filled that particular niche in the market).

Tempodivalse:There are a few other gripes I have about Ido, such as the correlative table losing its regularity and the practice of adding -al when making adjectives out of nouns (metalo -> metalala, geometrio -> geometriala).

I believe this is a result of Ido's word building system, a specific attempt to remedy the known issues with Esperanto's word building system, an attempt to avoid branding roots as being inherently noun-based or adjective-based. I think it adds unnecessary complexity and to an extent, it's at odds with Ido's attempts to be naturalistic. It sounds a bit weak to gripe about Esperanto mangling roots, and then come up with something like "geometriala" for "geometric".

Well, i think that for begin learn Ido you MUST to learn a little bit of Esperanto, because Ido is "son" (literally) of Esperanto.

Because Esperanto is better! Too lazy to give reasons.

Thanks everyone for the feedback. Good stuff! I perhaps should note here that I very much enjoy Esperanto and the purpose of the original question was simple curiosity and not in any way me trying to suggest a change from and/or abandoning of Esperanto. Anyhow, thanks again.

P.S.(apologies for making this thread. Didn't see that another on the topic existed)

Erinja and Tempodivalse have already stated many of my opinions, but I'd like to list, nevertheless, my own criticisms of Ido.

There is an Idist-perpetuated myth that the average Esperantist secretly believes Ido to be an improvement, but stays with Esperanto because of the community size. My feeling is that what Ido does is to remove the classic "old chestnut" aspects of Esperanto that people always complain about, but that by going so far with their reform, the resultant language is actually, overall, a little worse than Esperanto. Here's a breakdown.

The vocab is 90% French/Latin, reducing the internationality.

The merger of Ĝ and Ĵ doesn't make sense to me.

The digraphs and are ambiguous.

The diphthongs and were dropped because they "break the jaw", and yet is retained!

If it's necessary to have a special definite plural article (le), why isn't there a corresponding indefinite article?

There's no distinction between nouns and adjectives in the plural, so Esperanto's "lunaj/lunoj" becomes just "luni".

The rules for stress in pronunciation are needlessly more complex. From their point of view, they should've copied Idiom Neutral, I think.

I don't much like their usage of <-ab-> and <-es-> in verb conjugation. Btw, is the passive perfect <-abes-> or <-esab->??

The accusative-optional rule is too limited; it should be for all non-SVO phrases, not just those where the object precedes the subject.

became to make it less confusable with , but they still use !

The compound preposition is ugly. And the word is a false friend.

The personal pronoun system is botched because it tries to be too regular/derivational. And it's confusing how the prefix on has a male meaning (cf. ), and yet the prefix on has no meaning at all!

And there are many words with multiple forms, a situation that arises from the strange Idist conception of "euphony". Here's a list I've made: di la, dil; de la, del; da la, dal; ad, a; a la, ad la, al; ilu, il; elu, el; olu, ol; onu, on; ka, kad; esas, es; ica, ca; ita, ta.

I'd like to conclude by saying that I actually like and respect Ido as a well made and easy-to-learn language (seriously!) but I resent the way it wallows in a reputation of being superior to Esperanto. I think people should be aware of ITS shortcomings as they are of Esperanto's.