Okay so I'll keep this short and as to the point as I can. Why learn esperanto and not Ido? Is there some inherent flaw in Ido or did it just simply not catch on? Did it fail to bring anything new to the table, or did it fail to actually fix what people perceived as flaws in esperanto as it set out to do? I've been quite curious about this for a long time now and would greatly appreciate any answers (objective ones please) that you could provide. Thanks

Aubright:Is there some inherent flaw in Ido or did it just simply not catch on?

Well, is there some inherent flaw with Esperanto (or Spanish, French, Russian, or any other language for that matter)? If no, then why did English and not all those languages became the dominant language of international communication? I guess for the most part it's historical circumstances and not linguistic features which decide the status of one or another language.

Why not learn Ido? The short answer is inadequate user base.

A language is much more than a collection of rules - it is also an agreement among users about what words may be used in what contexts.

Have you done a search of the site for "ido"? This topic has been covered before.

Why Ido? I'm not sure. If you think Ido is truly easier or better than Esperanto, is it enough easier/better to justify giving up a large and thriving community with a well-developed literature in order to insist on Ido's version of things rather than Esperanto's? Life isn't always a simplicity contest. The easiest language doesn't necessarily 'win'. People learn a language for the community and benefits it offers; even when Ido was first created, whatever benefit some people may have perceived wasn't enough to make them drop Esperanto and move to Ido.

Part two of the answer is that in my opinion, Ido isn't objectively easier and it isn't an objective improvement on Esperanto. It makes a couple of cosmetic changes to make things look more "Romance" and its grammar works on a different set of fundamental assumptions (which surprisingly makes Ido's grammar not as close to Esperanto's as you might expect). If you look at Esperanto not being entirely Romance as a "flaw", then I guess Ido fixes that. If you look at Esperanto's alphabet as a flaw, then Ido "fixes" that too. If you don't like Esperanto's word derivation system, then Ido "fixes" that as well, but it's debatable as to whether Ido didn't make the problem worse. Ido makes a couple of things a bit more gender neutral, which is nice, but not really enough to accept all of its flaws, just for that.

Practically speaking there's not a lot of reason to learn Ido today, except for historical interest. Its community is very small and it doesn't have the kinds of resources and large events that Esperanto has. As I understand it, most Ido speakers speak Esperanto as well, just to have access to a larger community and more literature, so it's not some kind of either/or thing. I know a few Esperanto speakers who know a little Ido, either from general interest, or just to laugh at Ido by 'talking funny'. Ido is seen as a joke by most Esperantists; even Volapuk gets more respect as our historical predecessor.

On a totally non-objective personal note, Ido itself makes me laugh because I think it looks silly and fake. I fully recognize that other people see Esperanto in the same way, but when I see Ido text, I am unable to suppress an internal "tee hee, how silly it looks!".

The really long answer is ...

Ido's failure was arguably more political than linguistic. From my understanding, the founding Idists were rather dogmatic and aggressive in promoting their language, which ultimately resulted in them being alienated from the group they were trying to convert. Suffice to say, there was a lot of mud-slinging from both sides, and among some Esperantsts and Idists there remains a mutual distrust.

I studied Ido intermittently for a few weeks once, out of curiosity, and achieved an intermediate level, good enough to write a bit for the Ido Wikipedia (though I've now lost most of my finesse due to lack of use).

The way I see it, Ido takes one step forward beyond Esperanto, but then two steps back. There are many features of Ido which are, in my view, simplifications or improvements over Esperanto. For example: there is no noun-adjective agreement, the accusative case is almost never used; the slightly pesky diacritics have been removed, the pronouns become more aurally distinguishable (me, vu instead of mi, vi).

But a lot of unnecessary baggage was also introduced, negating the simplifications and actually making language more confusing. For instance: no more 1:1 letter-sound correspondence, irregular word accentuation, removal of mal- prefix (resulting in many new roots to learn). Idists, trying to "naturalise" the language, inevitably made the lexical aspect harder to grasp.

I no longer seriously pursue Ido primarily because there is very little community to interact or practice my skills with. Even Interlingua appears to be doing better nowadays, at least on the Internet.

That's not to say Ido is a bad language -- it can be as expressive as Esperanto -- I just consider it a little less straightforward.

even Volapuk gets more respect as our historical predecessor.

Indeed. Part of it may be that Volapük's founder faded into oblivion upon Esperanto's rise in popularity, rather than trying to stage a coup d'état of sorts like the Idists did, so there's never been that political conflict between the two. In fact, most Volapükists defected to Esperanto soon after its creation, whereas no similar exodus happened with Ido, which suggests that Esperanto was a much greater improvement over Volapük than Ido over Esperanto.

I am (slowly) studying Volapük at present. It's far more challenging than Esperanto, but very rewarding. In some ways it is the most aesthetically pleasing of the three.

Tempodivalse:
I no longer seriously pursue Ido primarily because there is very little community to interact or practice my skills with. Even Interlingua appears to be doing better nowadays, at least on the Internet.

Exactly -- I looked into Ido and worked through several Ido books/courses (they do exist), but there's almost no activity in "Idujo" compared to Esperantujo.

I've been an Interlinguist since the early 1990s (see a short article I published in 1992) and there is MUCH, MUCH more activity in Interlingua now than before. There are regular printed publications, new printed books each year (see Lulu), many new electronic books every month, and even a regular Interlingua podcast (Radio Interlingua).

Granted, the ratio of Esperanto activity to Interlingua activity is probably at least 100:1, but my unscientific feeling is that the Esperanto:Ido ratio is in the neighborhood of 100,000:1. (No offence intended to the Idistoj).

Amike,

Paul

pdenisowski:
Granted, the ratio of Esperanto activity to Interlingua activity is probably at least 100:1, but my unscientific feeling is that the Esperanto:Ido ratio is in the neighborhood of 100,000:1. (No offence intended to the Idistoj).Paul

I think 100k:1 is more like the ratio of Esperantists to Volapükists (who are still around on a Yahoo message board and some obscure blogs, but are otherwise absent from the Internet). I'd say 1,000:1 is a closer estimate.

One (not entirely accurate, but interesting) way to determine a language's Internet presence is to look at its Wikipedia.

The [url=io.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frontispico]Ido Wikipedia[/url] has around 25,000 articles. However, the large majority of these are either very short one-sentence pages, or articles created from a template, presumably by an automated bot (i.e. no original hand-written content).

Interlingua has only 13,000 articles but many of those contain substantial content. I'd say it's looking better.

Both of those wikis are doing much better than any of the other auxlangs (such as Occidental, Novial, etc.), however all are dwarfed in size by Vikipedio (175,000 articles, almost all created by hand).

(Ironically, Vükiped has 120,000 articles but they were all created by a bot. There are zero active editors. Just goes to show that you can't trust the numbers by themselves.)

I had a student once at lernu who came to Esperanto after looking into Ido with some degree of seriousness. He said something to me like, in Ido, you can find an online discussion group to talk about Ido. In Esperanto, you can find an online discussion group to talk about cats.

It stuck with me.

One might argue that this is one of the core differences between Esperanto and 'natural' languages - Esperanto speakers do spend an inordinate time talking about Esperanto, but in my experience, close friends who are Esperanto speakers mostly talk about normal topics. I suspect somewhat that the conversation turns to Esperanto so frequently partially because it is a guaranteed common interest between Esperanto speakers (who may not agree on any thing in the world other than this), and also because most Esperanto speakers are interested in languages in general, so languages are a popular topic.

Tempodivalse:Ido's failure was arguably more political than linguistic. From my understanding, the founding Idists were rather dogmatic and aggressive in promoting their language, which ultimately resulted in them being alienated from the group they were trying to convert. Suffice to say, there was a lot of mud-slinging from both sides, and among some Esperantsts and Idists there remains a mutual distrust.

This is true, but there's another aspect at work. In 1894, Zamenhof tried to appease some reformers by coming up with his own 'reformed Esperanto' and putting it up to a vote; it incorporated some elements supported by Ido proponents. It was voted down by the Esperanto speakers at the time. Some say that Zamenhof intentionally reformed Esperanto badly so that people would definitely vote it down, and there might be some truth in that (When I looked at it myself, I thought "This looks horrible, surely Zamenhof knew that" ). But at the same time, my gut tells me that Zamenhof was such a sincere and idealistic person, that I'm not sure he would have been so calculating about it that he would propose an intentionally bad reform. 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 think they recognized (and Esperanto speakers still recognize today) that the perfect can be the enemy of the good, and that it is impossible to come up with a language that everyone will agree is "the best" (if only because people have different and sometimes opposing ideas of what "good" looks like).

Tempodivalse:(Ironically, Vükiped has 120,000 articles but they were all created by a bot. There are zero active editors. Just goes to show that you can't trust the numbers by themselves.)

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