What is Ido? I've heard its supposed to be an improvement of Esperanto. What is it, and what do you think about it?

byronarnold:What is Ido? I've heard its supposed to be an improvement of Esperanto. What is it, and what do you think about it?

What a loaded question! The creation of Ido is one of the most 'soap-operatic' episodes in Esperanto history, but I won't get into that, since it wasn't your question.

The most un-biased response I can give you is that Ido eliminates some aspects of Esperanto that Ido's creator saw as being either unnecessary or difficult. A large number of additional suffixes were added. One of them, -end-, even migrated back to Esperanto. The -n ending is for the most part not used in Ido (though in some limited cases it is still necessary, so you still have to learn how to use it). Ido's verb endings were changed to make them closer to Romance language endings. Pronunciation was made somewhat less regular to conform to pronunciations common in national languages.

A large number of root words was introduced, to eliminate 'unnatural-looking' forms. For example, in Esperanto we say "mola" and "malmola" for soft and hard. I believe the Ido word for hard is "harda". There are many such examples, many of which deal with the mal- prefix. A non-gender-specific personal pronoun was added, and some prepositions were changed to make things look more Romance language-ish. Esperanto's special characters were removed. Ido has no correlatives table, you have to memorize them individually (and they are based on Romance languages)

In a nutshell, a lot of changes were made to make Esperanto look more like a Romance language, both in grammar and in vocabulary, in an effort to make it more international. You can make your own decision about whether "more Romance-like" is the same as "more international" and "more natural".

My personal opinion is that the changes made don't make Ido any easier than Esperanto, since there are more words to memorize, and the grammatical changes don't really make things any easier (in my opinion). Perhaps Ido is easier for those who already speak a Romance language. I don't know Ido's grammar in great detail, though. In Esperanto, the 16 rules don't even come close to describing the complete grammar; you would need a detailed grammar guide like the PMEG to make a true judgement about the ease or difficulty of Esperanto's grammar. Ido has nothing like the PMEG that I know of (at least not online) so I really can't make much of a comparison of grammar use. There have been no studies (that I know of) to prove whether Ido or Esperanto is easier.

And in my opinion, in spite of Ido's efforts to look more 'natural', it looks less natural than Esperanto. But that's an issue of personal opinion; you can go to Ido's Wikipedia and make your own decision (io.wikipedia.org). It does look more Romance than Esperanto, but the point of Esperanto wasn't to look like a romance language anyway.

I think that "More romance-like" is not "more international". How many languages are not Romance languages? How many people do not speak a romance language? Why would they do that?

The creation of Ido is one of the most 'soap-operatic' episodes in Esperanto history

Please, elaborate. I would love to hear more!!!

byronarnold:I think that "More romance-like" is not "more international". How many languages are not Romance languages? How many people do not speak a romance language? Why would they do that?

I think that they wanted it to look more "natural", and I think that they thought that since Ido was going to be "easier" than Esperanto anyway, that they might as well make it *even easier* for speakers of Romance languages. But it is a very Euro-centric worldview. I don't know how many Ido speakers there are outside of Europe, but if you look at a list of Ido annual conventions, not one has ever happened outside of Europe.

The creation of Ido is one of the most 'soap-operatic' episodes in Esperanto history

Please, elaborate. I would love to hear more!!!

Don Harlow has a lovely amusing description of it here: http://donh.best.vwh.net/Esperanto/EBook/chap03.ht...

He is, of course, a partisan for Esperanto, so he has been accused of not being honest with his depiction of the beginning of Ido, but I think the essential facts of the story are correct.

In any case, the gist of it is this: one of the two creators of Ido, Louis Couturat was involved with the Esperanto movement, and was involved in organizing a conference to choose an international language, in order to present a unified front when proposing use of an international language to international organizations. He was French, and he gained the support of the French Esperanto community by promising that Esperanto was practically certain to get chosen. A committee was formed to choose the language, and various languages were invited to make a presentation. Couturat informed Zamenhof that creators of languages would not be permitted to present their own languages, and he would therefore represent Esperanto to the committee.

What the French Esperanto speakers (and the other co-creator of Ido, and Zamenhof) didn't know was that this Couturat never had any intention of proposing Esperanto. Rather, he presented a plan for a reformed Esperanto; in other words, he presented Ido, and demanded that the Esperanto community accept Ido's 'reforms' within a month. Anyway, I recommend reading Don's page for a more complete story (and more entertaining details).

byronarnold:Please, elaborate. I would love to hear more!!!

Try Don Harlow's version, in chapter 3 of his "The Esperanto Book". (Hm. I haven't read this extract in a few years now and I note it's significantly different to how it was back then - see here for an archived version.)

Edit: you're quick to the draw Erin It would appear that Don's toned his language down somewhat...

Kwekubo:
Edit: you're quick to the draw Erin It would appear that Don's toned his language down somewhat...

You're right. His old version is what I read years ago, evidently, though I was not observant as you, and didn't immediately realize upon reading the newer version that it had been changed!

erinja:

byronarnold:I think that "More romance-like" is not "more international". How many languages are not Romance languages? How many people do not speak a romance language? Why would they do that?

I think that they wanted it to look more "natural", and I think that they thought that since Ido was going to be "easier" than Esperanto anyway, that they might as well make it *even easier* for speakers of Romance languages. But it is a very Euro-centric worldview.

Do not forget that at that time French was the "international" language, at least the diplomatic one (and most probably in commerce).

erinja:
In any case, the gist of it is this: one of the two creators of Ido, Louis Couturat was involved with the Esperanto movement, and was involved in organizing a conference to choose an international language, in order to present a unified front when proposing use of an international language to international organizations.

Couturat wanted to be the creator of THE international language and he organized the conference; but Zamenhof was represented by de Beaufront (this is not the true name of the man, but it is the one known in Esperantoland) who betrayed Zamenhof to adopt Couturat point of view.

byronarnold:
Please, elaborate. I would love to hear more!!!

Besides Don Harlow, have a look at Otto Jespersen's story.

byronarnold:What is Ido? I've heard its supposed to be an improvement of Esperanto. What is it, and what do you think about it?

To my understanding Ido is the result of a gradually 'westernised' esperanto (Okcidentesperanto ha ha ), and was created to reform on some things which westerners thought was difficult, and has gradually started to simplify, in result becoming like an alternate esperanto spoken in a parallel universe.

Examples of the westernisation include the reduction of hard-to-pronounce phonemes, reduction of consonant clusters, change of the -i to an -ar (which additionally is stressed unlike usual, like Spanish), changing of -oj to -i (replicating Italian), and compounding reminiscent of English and French (e.g. use of a hyphen to put say 'floro' and 'homo' together like 'floro-homo/flor-homo' - optional). It also has lost declension (like many of the ex-colonial languages) and instead uses a S-V-O verb order with adjectives coming after or before nouns the modify. Imperatives also use -ez instead of -u, like 'Savez olu!' (Know it!). For these reasons, it doesn't have the same international and semantic value as Esperanto.

Kompleta gramatiko detaloza: HTML PDF

If they'd stopped at the grammatical changes, and only enough vocabulary change to support that grammar, Ido might have been serious competition. Unfortunately for the project though, they changed the vocabulary a lot to make it more Romance. I think this made it less likely that many Esperantists, their best target audience, would want to give it a try; they'd already learned a pretty good Esperantish vocabulary.

Even so, to this day most Idists are curious Esperantists.

For some more links, see my Ido page.