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intelligibility of Ido and Esperanto

orthohawk-tól, 2015. június 16.

Hozzászólások: 6

Nyelv: English

orthohawk (Profil megtekintése) 2015. június 16. 2:48:53

A post by Tempodivalse in another thread got me thinking about a question I've long wondered about.

Exactly how close are Ido and Esperanto? Are they closer to each other than, say, the local German dialect in Zurich is to that of Thuringia, for example? Czech and Slovak? The mainland Scandinavian languages?

Based on the model of German, could Ido be considered a "dialect" of Esperanto, as the dialectal varieties in Switzerland are "dialects" of German?

Tempodivalse (Profil megtekintése) 2015. június 16. 3:16:20

Well, you can compare for yourself and see how much you can understand: Wikipedio per Ido. I studied Ido, so I can't tell how intelligible it looks to someone who has only been exposed to Esperanto.

The grammatical changes are mostly superficial: -ar, -or, -ir are the infinitive endings; -i becomes the noun plural; -ez is the volitive; subject-verb agreement is lost, accusative is not used for SVO word order (but preserved for other word orders). Then there is the orthography, which you can get used to after a few minutes.

The lexicon, however, was changed a lot. The correlative table has been replaced by irregular borrowings from Latinate languages, and separate roots are preferred to affixes+roots (the equivalent of mal- in particular is rarely used). Some of the existing roots have also been changed, though usually not beyond recognisability.

I would say the level of similarity is somewhat lower than between Swedish/Norwegian/Danish. A better comparison might be Dutch/Afrikaans, or maybe Russian/Belarussian.

rapn21 (Profil megtekintése) 2015. június 16. 9:29:09

I've never studied Ido but I could understand about two-thirds just based on my knowledge of Esperanto.

erinja (Profil megtekintése) 2015. június 16. 13:39:56

If you know nothing at all about Ido and you know Esperanto, maybe you'll get about 60-70%. But if you spend 10 minutes and learn a few basic facts about how Ido works, you will get maybe 90%. Depends also on what other languages you speak. Ido is heavily biased towards Romance languages, so if you speak a Romance language (or if you have a good vocabulary in English), that will help extremely. If you are bilingual Chinese/Esperanto and that's it, you'll understand a good deal less than a French/Esperanto speaker.

Rujo (Profil megtekintése) 2015. június 16. 17:35:51

Tempodivalse:
The grammatical changes are mostly superficial: -ar, -or, -ir are the infinitive endings; -i becomes the noun plural; -ez is the volitive; subject-verb agreement is lost, accusative is not used for SVO word order (but preserved for other word orders). Then there is the orthography, which you can get used to after a few minutes.
The non using of the accusative is no advantage of IDO. In Esperanto we can also avoid this one, depending on the circumstances. Zamenhof has said pri la akuzativo, in Lingvaj Respondoj: "Tuŝante la akuzativon mi povas al vi doni la jenan konsilon: uzu ĝin ĉiam nur en tiuj okazoj, kie vi vidas ke ĝi estas efektive necesa; en ĉiuj aliaj okazoj, kie vi ne scias, ĉu oni devas uzi la akuzativon aŭ la nominativon - uzu ĉiam la nominativon. La akuzativo estas enkondukita nur el neceso, ĉar sen ĝi la senco ofte estus ne klara; sed ĝia uzado en okazo de nebezono pli multe malbeligas la lingvon ol la neŭzado en okazo de bezono." (La Esperantisto, 1980, p. 27).

Tempodivalse (Profil megtekintése) 2015. június 16. 18:06:47

Rujo:
The non using of the accusative is no advantage of IDO. In Esperanto we can also avoid this one, depending on the circumstances. Zamenhof has said pri la akuzativo, in Lingvaj Respondoj: "Tuŝante la akuzativon mi povas al vi doni la jenan konsilon: uzu ĝin ĉiam nur en tiuj okazoj, kie vi vidas ke ĝi estas efektive necesa; en ĉiuj aliaj okazoj, kie vi ne scias, ĉu oni devas uzi la akuzativon aŭ la nominativon - uzu ĉiam la nominativon. La akuzativo estas enkondukita nur el neceso, ĉar sen ĝi la senco ofte estus ne klara; sed ĝia uzado en okazo de nebezono pli multe malbeligas la lingvon ol la neŭzado en okazo de bezono." (La Esperantisto, 1980, p. 27).
I think you've taken this quote is taken a bit out of context.

My understanding is that Z is giving advice to a beginner who hasn't yet mastered the accusative: if it doesn't seem obvious that you should use an accusative (i.e., not a direct object, no directionality), then it will be, more often than not, unnecessary.

However, this doesn't have anything to do with SVO word order. If you want to indicate a direct object, you need to use the accusative even in SVO (or some other oblique case where the meaning wouldn't change, as in the case of Mi helpis al li).

Ido is different in that it expressly allows dropping the accusative with SVO word order. To me, this introduces an unnecessary level of complexity into the language - why not just use the accusative everywhere, or remove it altogether, instead of creating a new set of rules where it can be dropped?

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