Ido
Encyclopedia
Ido (ˈiːdoʊ) is a constructed language
created with the goal of becoming a universal second language for speakers of different linguistic backgrounds as a language easier to learn than ethnic languages. Unlike English, which is a natural
and often irregular language, Ido was specifically designed for grammatical, orthographic
, and lexicographical regularity, and to favor no one who might otherwise be advantaged in a situation due to native fluency in a widespread language. In this sense, Ido is classified as a consciously created International Auxiliary Language
(conIAL). Many other reform projects appeared after Ido: examples such as Occidental
and Novial
appeared afterwards but have since faded into obscurity. At present, Ido is one of the three auxiliary languages (along with Esperanto
and Interlingua
) with a large body of literature and a relatively large speaker base.
Ido was developed in the early 1900s, and retains a following today, primarily in Europe
. It is largely based on Esperanto
, created by L. L. Zamenhof
. Ido first appeared in 1907 as a result of a desire to reform perceived flaws in Esperanto that some of its supporters believed to be a hindrance in its propagation as an easy-to-learn second language.
The name of the language traces its origin to the Esperanto/Ido word ido, meaning "offspring", since the language was a "descendant" of Esperanto.
Ido uses the 26 letters of the ISO basic Latin alphabet with no diacritic
s. While still being completely morphologically regular, Ido resembles the Romance languages
in appearance and is sometimes mistaken for Italian
or Spanish
at first glance. Ido is largely intelligible to those who have studied Esperanto, though there are certain differences in word formation, grammar and grammatical-function words that make it more than a simple reform project. Ido is a stand-alone language, with its own ISO 639 language code.
After its inception, Ido gained support (estimates generally range around 20%) from some in the Esperanto community at the time, but following the sudden death in 1914 of one of its most influential proponents, Louis Couturat
, it declined in popularity. There were two reasons for this: first, the emergence of further schisms arising from competing reform projects; and second, a general lack of awareness of Ido as a candidate for an international language. These obstacles weakened the movement and it was not until the rise of the Internet that it began to regain its former momentum.
under the name Lingua Ignota
. But the idea did not catch on in large numbers until the 19th century with the language Volapük
, created in 1879 by German Catholic
priest
Johann Martin Schleyer
. Volapük was popular for some time and apparently had a few thousand users, but was later eclipsed by the popularity of Esperanto, which arose from L. L. Zamenhof
's book Unua Libro
in 1887. The simpler grammar and less changed vocabulary of Esperanto appealed to many, and its popularity quickly rose. The first World Congress of Esperanto
was held in 1905. However, some within the Esperanto community itself felt that the language should undergo further reform before being officially selected as a universal second language. It was at this time that Louis Couturat
formed the Delegation for the Adoption of an International Auxiliary Language
.
This delegation made a formal request to the International Association of Academies
in Vienna
to select an international language; the request was rejected in May 1907. The Delegation then decided to meet as a Committee in Paris
in October 1907 to discuss the adoption of a standard international language among the various competitors that had been devised till then. According to the minutes
of the Committee, it was decided that no language was completely acceptable, but that Esperanto
could be accepted "on condition of several modifications to be realized by the permanent Commission in the direction defined by the conclusions of the Report of the Secretaries (Couturat and Leopold Leau
) and by the Ido project." This (anonymous) "Ido project" was later suggested to have been primarily devised by Couturat with some help from Esperanto's representative before the Committee, Louis de Beaufront
. Beaufront had himself argued for reforming Esperanto before he was selected to the Delegation. His eventual "conversion" to the Ido camp, upon the presentation of that language, was thus consistent with his earlier positions.
Early supporters of Esperanto tended to resist reforms, and its inventor, Zamenhof
, deferred to their judgment. Several of the reforms adopted by Ido were themselves proposed at various times by Zamenhof, especially in 1894 when he proposed eliminating the accented letters and the accusative case (referring to it as "superfluous ballast" ), changing the plural to an Italianesque -i, and replacing the table of correlatives with more Latinate words (see History of Esperanto and Reformed Esperanto
). The custom of keeping the basic rules of Esperanto fixed remains today.
Couturat, who was the leading proponent of Ido, was killed in an automobile accident in 1914, which, along with World War I
, dealt a serious blow to the Ido movement. Although that movement recovered to some degree in the immediate postwar period, the whole movement of international languages became balkanized
. With the publication of an even more Europeanized planned language, Occidental
, in 1922, Ido went into decline. The Ido movement lost a majority of its published periodicals in the subsequent year or so, and the defection of its major intellectual supporter, the Danish linguist Otto Jespersen
, in 1928 on the occasion of the publication of his own planned language Novial
, seemed at the time to provide a quietus.
Some observers trace the eclipse of Ido to its hybrid character – part Esperanto reform project, part Standard Average European
(see Sapir–Whorf hypothesis
). In this view, once it was clear that Ido would neither displace Esperanto nor be adopted by the Esperanto community, many viewed its Esperanto-like features as unnecessary baggage and moved on to more naturalistic projects. Those who approved of them tended to return to the larger Esperanto community.
Ido's decline had slowed by the 1930s, and the movement was still a significant force in interlinguistics
during the long gestation of the International Auxiliary Language Association
's project. Like the Occidentalists
, many Idists hoped that IALA would produce a language relatively close to their own preferences. In the end, the radically naturalistic Interlingua
was even farther from Ido than Occidental, and (in contrast to Occidental) there was no major migration of Ido supporters to the new language.
Ido's survival during this period was assisted by financial resources accumulated during its heyday (e.g., the chemist Wilhelm Ostwald
had donated the proceeds of his 1909 Nobel Prize
to an Ido foundation).
The language still has active speakers today, and the Internet has sparked a renewal of interest in the language in recent years. The estimates of the number of speakers range from 2,000 to 5,000. In comparison, Esperanto
has at least 100,000 (Sidney S. Culbert
's widely cited estimate of 1.6 million speakers is controversial).
Jespersen, who was present during the ten days of Committee deliberations in Paris and later served as part of the permanent Commission, wrote a history of Ido.
A number of Esperanto supporters have attacked Ido over the years. The Esperantist Don Harlow
has characterized Ido's founders as underhanded and conspiratorial; see also Emile Boirac's report in the list of external links; also Gaston Waringhien's “Kulisaj manovroj” (Maneuvers in the Wings) in his 1887 kaj la sekvo, Antwerp: Stafeto, 1980. However, most Ido partisans argue that Harlow's history is polemical and is not consistent with all the eyewitness accounts, such as those reported by Jespersen. Harlow bases his account on material from some other eyewitnesses such as Emile Boirac
and Gaston Moch
and with other source documentation (such as Zamenhof's correspondence with Couturat and others during the period, as published in the two-volume Leteroj de Zamenhof, Paris: SAT, 1948), to which Jespersen, according to Harlow, would not have had access.
, and in many cases, the vocabulary is similar. Ido shares with Esperanto the goals of grammatical simplicity and consistency, ease of learning, and the use of loanword
s from various European languages. The two languages, to a great extent, are mutually intelligible. However, certain changes were introduced to address some of the concerns that had arisen about Esperanto. These include:
Nevertheless, modern Esperanto has received some influence from Ido in areas such as a clarification of the rules for word derivation and suffixes like -oz- ("abundant in") and -end- ("required to").
s used by Esperanto, IPA: x and d͡ʒ. (The distinctions between x~h and between d͡ʒ~ʒ carry a very low functional load
in Esperanto, and so were deemed to be unnecessary in Ido.) Without those two consonant phonemes, the consonants in the language are as follows:
The accent rule in Ido is regular, but slightly more complex than that of Esperanto: all polysyllables are stressed on the penultimate (next to last) syllable except for verb infinitive
s, which are stressed on the ultimate syllable—skolo, kafeo and lernas for "school", "coffee" and "learn(s)/am, is, are learning" (present tense), but irar, savar and drinkar for "to go", "to know" and "to drink". If an i or u precedes another vowel, the pair is considered part of the same syllable when applying the accent rule—thus radio, familio and manuo for "radio", "family" and "hand", unless the two vowels are the only ones in the word, in which case the "i" or "u" is stressed: dio, frua for "day" and "early".
s.
In addition, Ido has three digraph
s:
Etymological Esperanto words containing , , kz, kv correspond to etymological Ido words spelled with h~k, j, x, qu, respectively, although the pronunciation of the spelling of the cognates differs in such cases.
es between the root and the grammatical ending. As with Esperanto, Ido is grammatically invariable; there are no exceptions in Ido, unlike in natural languages.
Some of the grammatical endings are defined as follows:
These are the same as in Esperanto except for -i, -ir, -ar, -or and -ez. Esperanto marks noun plurals by an agglutinative ending -j (so plural nouns end in -oj), uses -i for verb infinitives (Esperanto infinitives are tenseless), and uses -u for the imperative. Verbs in Ido do not conjugate depending on person, number or gender; the -as, -is, and -os endings suffice whether the subject is I, you, he, she, they, or anything else.
Negation occurs in Ido by simply affixing ne to the front of a verb: Me ne havas libro means, "I do not have a book". This as well does not vary, and thus the "I do not", "He does not", "They do not" before a verb are simply Me ne, Il ne, and Li ne. In the same way, past tense and future tense negatives are formed by ne in front of the conjugated verb. "I will not go" and "I did not go" become Me ne iros and Me ne iris respectively.
Yes/no questions are formed by the particle ka in front of the question. "I have a book" (me havas libro) becomes Ka me havas libro? (do I have a book?). Ka can also be placed in front of a noun without a verb to make a simple question, corresponding to the English "is it?" Ka Mark? can mean, "Are you Mark?", "Is it Mark?", "Do you mean Mark?" depending on the context.
s of Ido were revised to make them more acoustically distinct than those of Esperanto, which all end in i. Especially the singular and plural first-person pronouns mi and ni may be difficult to distinguish in a noisy environment, so Ido has me and ni instead. Ido also distinguishes between intimate (tu) and formal (vu)
second-person singular pronouns as well as plural second-person pronouns (vi) not marked for intimacy. Furthermore, Ido has a pan-gender third-person pronoun lu (it can mean "he", "she", or "it", depending on the context) in addition to its masculine (il), feminine (el), and neuter (ol) third-person pronouns.
It should be noted that ol, like English it and Esperanto ĝi, is not limited to inanimate objects, but can be used "for entities whose sex is indeterminate: babies, children, humans, youths, elders, people, individuals, horses, cows, cats, etc."
Lu is often mistakenly labeled an epicene
pronoun, that is, one that refers to both masculine and feminine beings, but in fact, lu is more properly a "pan-gender" pronoun, as it is also used for referring to inanimate objects. From Kompleta Gramatiko Detaloza di la Linguo Internaciona Ido by Beaufront:
Lu (like li) is used for all three genders. That lu does duty for the three genders at will in the singular is not in itself any more astonishing than seeing li serve the three genders at will in the plural ... By a decision (1558) the Idist Academy rejected every restriction concerning the use of lu. One may thus use that pronoun in exactly the same way for a thing and a person of obvious sex as for animals of unknown sex and a person that has a genderless name, like baby, child, human, etc., these being as truly masculine as feminine.
The motives for this decision were given in "Mondo", XI, 68: Lu for the singular is exactly the same as li for the plural. Logic, symmetry and ease demand this. Consequently, just as li may be used for people, animals, and things whenever nothing obliges one to express the gender, so lu may be used for people, animals, and things under the same condition. The proposed distinction would be a bothersome subtlety...
In addition, a comparison of Ido vocabulary to the six shows the following for the similarities of Ido to the six languages above:
This is consistent with the fact that Ido is sometimes mistaken for French, Italian or Spanish at first sight.
Comparison of vocabulary with the six languages:
Vocabulary in Ido is often created through a number of official prefixes and suffixes that alter the meaning of the word. This allows a user to take existing words and modify them to create neologisms when necessary, and allows for a wide range of expression without the need to learn new vocabulary each time. Though their number is too large to be included in one article, some examples include:
New vocabulary is generally created through an analysis of the word, its etymology
, and reference to the six source languages. If a word can be created through vocabulary already existing in the language then it will usually be adopted without need for a new radical (such as wikipedio for Wikipedia, which consists of wiki + enciklopedio for encyclopedia), and if not an entirely new word will be created. The word alternatoro for example was adopted in 1926, likely because five of the six source languages used largely the same orthography
for the word, and because it was long enough to avoid being mistaken for other words in the existing vocabulary. Adoption of a word is done through consensus, after which the word will be made official by the union
. Care must also be taken to avoid homonym
s if possible, and usually a new word undergoes some discussion before being adopted. Foreign words that have a restricted sense and are not likely to be used in everyday life (such as the word intifada to refer to the conflict between Israel
and Palestine
) are left untouched, and often written in italics.
postings by the prominent Esperantist Don Harlow
have estimated the population at being somewhere in the thousands, but no accurate numbers exist. Moreover, given the often political IAL environment in which those that speak a language are not merely language users but adherents to its system and linguistic philosophy as well, there are two categories of those that know the language, Ido speakers and Ido supporters. Ido resembles Esperanto to a large extent, and many Esperantists have learned Ido out of curiosity while still not using it, preferring to support the more well-known Esperanto movement instead. One Esperanto bulletin board included the following:
It is possible to find discussions of this nature on the Internet in English, Esperanto, Ido, Interlingua and other IALs, each understanding the other with little problem.
A number of Esperantists viewed the schism of Ido as a mixed blessing, and a number of writings show that some were inversely glad to see those who were interested only in creating a perfect language by constantly reforming it leave the fold so that those remaining could work on using and promoting the language itself. However, these "constant reformers" eventually moved on to other reform projects, few of which survived much beyond the deaths of the authors themselves, and Ido has remained constant since then—it is safe to say that were Ido a community of language reformers during its early days, that this is not the case anymore.
A small sample of 24 Idists on the Yahoo!
group Idolisto during late 2005 showed that 57% had begun their studies of the language during the past three years, 32% from the mid-1990s to 2002, and 8% had known the language from before.
CHAPITRO XVII
from verses by Russian poet Yunna Morits
.
(listen)
The online encyclopedia Wikipedia
includes an Ido-language edition (known in Ido as Wikipedio); , it has over 18,000 articles.
Constructed language
A planned or constructed language—known colloquially as a conlang—is a language whose phonology, grammar, and/or vocabulary has been consciously devised by an individual or group, instead of having evolved naturally...
created with the goal of becoming a universal second language for speakers of different linguistic backgrounds as a language easier to learn than ethnic languages. Unlike English, which is a natural
Natural language
In the philosophy of language, a natural language is any language which arises in an unpremeditated fashion as the result of the innate facility for language possessed by the human intellect. A natural language is typically used for communication, and may be spoken, signed, or written...
and often irregular language, Ido was specifically designed for grammatical, orthographic
Orthography
The orthography of a language specifies a standardized way of using a specific writing system to write the language. Where more than one writing system is used for a language, for example Kurdish, Uyghur, Serbian or Inuktitut, there can be more than one orthography...
, and lexicographical regularity, and to favor no one who might otherwise be advantaged in a situation due to native fluency in a widespread language. In this sense, Ido is classified as a consciously created International Auxiliary Language
International auxiliary language
An international auxiliary language or interlanguage is a language meant for communication between people from different nations who do not share a common native language...
(conIAL). Many other reform projects appeared after Ido: examples such as Occidental
Occidental language
The language Occidental, later Interlingue, is a planned language created by the Balto-German naval officer and teacher Edgar de Wahl and published in 1922....
and Novial
Novial
Novial [nov- + IAL, International Auxiliary Language] is a constructed international auxiliary language intended to facilitate international communication and friendship, without displacing anyone's native language...
appeared afterwards but have since faded into obscurity. At present, Ido is one of the three auxiliary languages (along with Esperanto
Esperanto
is the most widely spoken constructed international auxiliary language. Its name derives from Doktoro Esperanto , the pseudonym under which L. L. Zamenhof published the first book detailing Esperanto, the Unua Libro, in 1887...
and Interlingua
Interlingua
Interlingua is an international auxiliary language , developed between 1937 and 1951 by the International Auxiliary Language Association...
) with a large body of literature and a relatively large speaker base.
Ido was developed in the early 1900s, and retains a following today, primarily in Europe
Europe
Europe is, by convention, one of the world's seven continents. Comprising the westernmost peninsula of Eurasia, Europe is generally 'divided' from Asia to its east by the watershed divides of the Ural and Caucasus Mountains, the Ural River, the Caspian and Black Seas, and the waterways connecting...
. It is largely based on Esperanto
Esperanto
is the most widely spoken constructed international auxiliary language. Its name derives from Doktoro Esperanto , the pseudonym under which L. L. Zamenhof published the first book detailing Esperanto, the Unua Libro, in 1887...
, created by L. L. Zamenhof
L. L. Zamenhof
Ludwig Lazarus Zamenhof December 15, 1859 – April 14, 1917) was the inventor of Esperanto, the most successful constructed language designed for international communication.-Cultural background:...
. Ido first appeared in 1907 as a result of a desire to reform perceived flaws in Esperanto that some of its supporters believed to be a hindrance in its propagation as an easy-to-learn second language.
The name of the language traces its origin to the Esperanto/Ido word ido, meaning "offspring", since the language was a "descendant" of Esperanto.
Ido uses the 26 letters of the ISO basic Latin alphabet with no diacritic
Diacritic
A diacritic is a glyph added to a letter, or basic glyph. The term derives from the Greek διακριτικός . Diacritic is both an adjective and a noun, whereas diacritical is only an adjective. Some diacritical marks, such as the acute and grave are often called accents...
s. While still being completely morphologically regular, Ido resembles the Romance languages
Romance languages
The Romance languages are a branch of the Indo-European language family, more precisely of the Italic languages subfamily, comprising all the languages that descend from Vulgar Latin, the language of ancient Rome...
in appearance and is sometimes mistaken for Italian
Italian language
Italian is a Romance language spoken mainly in Europe: Italy, Switzerland, San Marino, Vatican City, by minorities in Malta, Monaco, Croatia, Slovenia, France, Libya, Eritrea, and Somalia, and by immigrant communities in the Americas and Australia...
or Spanish
Spanish language
Spanish , also known as Castilian , is a Romance language in the Ibero-Romance group that evolved from several languages and dialects in central-northern Iberia around the 9th century and gradually spread with the expansion of the Kingdom of Castile into central and southern Iberia during the...
at first glance. Ido is largely intelligible to those who have studied Esperanto, though there are certain differences in word formation, grammar and grammatical-function words that make it more than a simple reform project. Ido is a stand-alone language, with its own ISO 639 language code.
After its inception, Ido gained support (estimates generally range around 20%) from some in the Esperanto community at the time, but following the sudden death in 1914 of one of its most influential proponents, Louis Couturat
Louis Couturat
Louis Couturat was a French logician, mathematician, philosopher, and linguist.-Life:Born in Ris-Orangis, Essonne, France, he was educated in philosophy and mathematics at the École Normale Supérieure...
, it declined in popularity. There were two reasons for this: first, the emergence of further schisms arising from competing reform projects; and second, a general lack of awareness of Ido as a candidate for an international language. These obstacles weakened the movement and it was not until the rise of the Internet that it began to regain its former momentum.
History
The idea of a universal second language is not new, and constructed languages are not a recent phenomenon. The first known constructed language was created in the 12th century by St Hildegard of BingenHildegard of Bingen
Blessed Hildegard of Bingen , also known as Saint Hildegard, and Sibyl of the Rhine, was a German writer, composer, philosopher, Christian mystic, Benedictine abbess, visionary, and polymath. Elected a magistra by her fellow nuns in 1136, she founded the monasteries of Rupertsberg in 1150 and...
under the name Lingua Ignota
Lingua Ignota
A Lingua Ignota was described by the 12th century abbess of Rupertsberg, Hildegard of Bingen, who apparently used it for mystical purposes...
. But the idea did not catch on in large numbers until the 19th century with the language Volapük
Volapük
Volapük is a constructed language, created in 1879–1880 by Johann Martin Schleyer, a Roman Catholic priest in Baden, Germany. Schleyer felt that God had told him in a dream to create an international language. Volapük conventions took place in 1884 , 1887 and 1889 . The first two conventions used...
, created in 1879 by German Catholic
Catholic
The word catholic comes from the Greek phrase , meaning "on the whole," "according to the whole" or "in general", and is a combination of the Greek words meaning "about" and meaning "whole"...
priest
Priest
A priest is a person authorized to perform the sacred rites of a religion, especially as a mediatory agent between humans and deities. They also have the authority or power to administer religious rites; in particular, rites of sacrifice to, and propitiation of, a deity or deities...
Johann Martin Schleyer
Johann Martin Schleyer
Martin Schleyer was a German Catholic priest who invented the constructed language Volapük. His official name was "Martin Schleyer"; he added the name "Johann" unofficially....
. Volapük was popular for some time and apparently had a few thousand users, but was later eclipsed by the popularity of Esperanto, which arose from L. L. Zamenhof
L. L. Zamenhof
Ludwig Lazarus Zamenhof December 15, 1859 – April 14, 1917) was the inventor of Esperanto, the most successful constructed language designed for international communication.-Cultural background:...
's book Unua Libro
Unua Libro
The Unua Libro was the first publication to describe the international language Esperanto . It was first published in Russian on July 26, 1887 in Warsaw, by Dr. L.L. Zamenhof, the creator of Esperanto. Over the next few years editions were published in Russian, Hebrew, Polish, French, German,...
in 1887. The simpler grammar and less changed vocabulary of Esperanto appealed to many, and its popularity quickly rose. The first World Congress of Esperanto
World Congress of Esperanto
The World Congress of Esperanto has the longest tradition among international Esperanto conventions, with an almost unbroken run of more than a hundred years. The congresses have been held since 1905 every year, except during World Wars I and II...
was held in 1905. However, some within the Esperanto community itself felt that the language should undergo further reform before being officially selected as a universal second language. It was at this time that Louis Couturat
Louis Couturat
Louis Couturat was a French logician, mathematician, philosopher, and linguist.-Life:Born in Ris-Orangis, Essonne, France, he was educated in philosophy and mathematics at the École Normale Supérieure...
formed the Delegation for the Adoption of an International Auxiliary Language
Delegation for the Adoption of an International Auxiliary Language
The Delegation for the Adoption of an International Auxiliary Language was a body of academics convened in the early part of the twentieth century to decide on the issue of the which international auxiliary language should be chosen for international use...
.
This delegation made a formal request to the International Association of Academies
International Association of Academies
The International Association of Academies was an academy designed for the purpose of linking the various Academies around the world, of which the first meeting was held in Paris, France, in 1900. The first president was M. J. de Goeje, a Dutch Orientalist....
in Vienna
Vienna
Vienna is the capital and largest city of the Republic of Austria and one of the nine states of Austria. Vienna is Austria's primary city, with a population of about 1.723 million , and is by far the largest city in Austria, as well as its cultural, economic, and political centre...
to select an international language; the request was rejected in May 1907. The Delegation then decided to meet as a Committee in Paris
Paris
Paris is the capital and largest city in France, situated on the river Seine, in northern France, at the heart of the Île-de-France region...
in October 1907 to discuss the adoption of a standard international language among the various competitors that had been devised till then. According to the minutes
Minutes
Minutes, also known as protocols, are the instant written record of a meeting or hearing. They typically describe the events of the meeting, starting with a list of attendees, a statement of the issues considered by the participants, and related responses or decisions for the issues.Minutes may be...
of the Committee, it was decided that no language was completely acceptable, but that Esperanto
Esperanto
is the most widely spoken constructed international auxiliary language. Its name derives from Doktoro Esperanto , the pseudonym under which L. L. Zamenhof published the first book detailing Esperanto, the Unua Libro, in 1887...
could be accepted "on condition of several modifications to be realized by the permanent Commission in the direction defined by the conclusions of the Report of the Secretaries (Couturat and Leopold Leau
Léopold Leau
Léopold Leau was a French mathematician, primarily known for his many well-documented ties to international auxiliary languages....
) and by the Ido project." This (anonymous) "Ido project" was later suggested to have been primarily devised by Couturat with some help from Esperanto's representative before the Committee, Louis de Beaufront
Louis de Beaufront
Marquis Louis de Beaufront was a major influence in the development of Ido, an international auxiliary language. Beaufront was initially an advocate of Esperanto and was largely responsible for its early diffusion in western Europe as well as one of its first French proponents.Much of Beaufront's...
. Beaufront had himself argued for reforming Esperanto before he was selected to the Delegation. His eventual "conversion" to the Ido camp, upon the presentation of that language, was thus consistent with his earlier positions.
Early supporters of Esperanto tended to resist reforms, and its inventor, Zamenhof
Zamenhof
Zamenhof is a surname. Notable people with the surname include:* Rozalia Zamenhof, née Sofer , mother of Ludwik* Romana Zamenhof , a Jewish Polish female Esperantist and pharmaceutist...
, deferred to their judgment. Several of the reforms adopted by Ido were themselves proposed at various times by Zamenhof, especially in 1894 when he proposed eliminating the accented letters and the accusative case (referring to it as "superfluous ballast" ), changing the plural to an Italianesque -i, and replacing the table of correlatives with more Latinate words (see History of Esperanto and Reformed Esperanto
Reformed Esperanto
Reformed Esperanto was a reformed version of Esperanto created in 1894. It is notable as the only complete Esperantido to have been created by Esperanto's original creator, Dr. L. L. Zamenhof. Although Zamenhof's stated preference was to avoid any discussion of changes, he was put under...
). The custom of keeping the basic rules of Esperanto fixed remains today.
Couturat, who was the leading proponent of Ido, was killed in an automobile accident in 1914, which, along with World War I
World War I
World War I , which was predominantly called the World War or the Great War from its occurrence until 1939, and the First World War or World War I thereafter, was a major war centred in Europe that began on 28 July 1914 and lasted until 11 November 1918...
, dealt a serious blow to the Ido movement. Although that movement recovered to some degree in the immediate postwar period, the whole movement of international languages became balkanized
Balkanization
Balkanization, or Balkanisation, is a geopolitical term, originally used to describe the process of fragmentation or division of a region or state into smaller regions or states that are often hostile or non-cooperative with each other, and it is considered pejorative.The term refers to the...
. With the publication of an even more Europeanized planned language, Occidental
Occidental language
The language Occidental, later Interlingue, is a planned language created by the Balto-German naval officer and teacher Edgar de Wahl and published in 1922....
, in 1922, Ido went into decline. The Ido movement lost a majority of its published periodicals in the subsequent year or so, and the defection of its major intellectual supporter, the Danish linguist Otto Jespersen
Otto Jespersen
Jens Otto Harry Jespersen or Otto Jespersen was a Danish linguist who specialized in the grammar of the English language.He was born in Randers in northern Jutland and attended Copenhagen University, earning degrees in English, French, and Latin...
, in 1928 on the occasion of the publication of his own planned language Novial
Novial
Novial [nov- + IAL, International Auxiliary Language] is a constructed international auxiliary language intended to facilitate international communication and friendship, without displacing anyone's native language...
, seemed at the time to provide a quietus.
Some observers trace the eclipse of Ido to its hybrid character – part Esperanto reform project, part Standard Average European
Standard Average European
Standard Average European is a concept introduced by Benjamin Whorf to group the modern, Indo-European languages of Europe in the sense of a Sprachbund.The more central members of the SAE Sprachbund are Romance and West Germanic, i.e...
(see Sapir–Whorf hypothesis
Sapir–Whorf hypothesis
The principle of linguistic relativity holds that the structure of a language affects the ways in which its speakers are able to conceptualize their world, i.e. their world view...
). In this view, once it was clear that Ido would neither displace Esperanto nor be adopted by the Esperanto community, many viewed its Esperanto-like features as unnecessary baggage and moved on to more naturalistic projects. Those who approved of them tended to return to the larger Esperanto community.
Ido's decline had slowed by the 1930s, and the movement was still a significant force in interlinguistics
Interlinguistics
Interlinguistics is the study of various aspects of linguistic communication between people who cannot make themselves understood by means of their different first languages...
during the long gestation of the International Auxiliary Language Association
International Auxiliary Language Association
The International Auxiliary Language Association was founded in 1924 to "promote widespread study, discussion and publicity of all questions involved in the establishment of an auxiliary language, together with research and experiment that may hasten such establishment in an intelligent manner and...
's project. Like the Occidentalists
Occidental language
The language Occidental, later Interlingue, is a planned language created by the Balto-German naval officer and teacher Edgar de Wahl and published in 1922....
, many Idists hoped that IALA would produce a language relatively close to their own preferences. In the end, the radically naturalistic Interlingua
Interlingua
Interlingua is an international auxiliary language , developed between 1937 and 1951 by the International Auxiliary Language Association...
was even farther from Ido than Occidental, and (in contrast to Occidental) there was no major migration of Ido supporters to the new language.
Ido's survival during this period was assisted by financial resources accumulated during its heyday (e.g., the chemist Wilhelm Ostwald
Wilhelm Ostwald
Friedrich Wilhelm Ostwald was a Baltic German chemist. He received the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1909 for his work on catalysis, chemical equilibria and reaction velocities...
had donated the proceeds of his 1909 Nobel Prize
Nobel Prize
The Nobel Prizes are annual international awards bestowed by Scandinavian committees in recognition of cultural and scientific advances. The will of the Swedish chemist Alfred Nobel, the inventor of dynamite, established the prizes in 1895...
to an Ido foundation).
The language still has active speakers today, and the Internet has sparked a renewal of interest in the language in recent years. The estimates of the number of speakers range from 2,000 to 5,000. In comparison, Esperanto
Esperanto
is the most widely spoken constructed international auxiliary language. Its name derives from Doktoro Esperanto , the pseudonym under which L. L. Zamenhof published the first book detailing Esperanto, the Unua Libro, in 1887...
has at least 100,000 (Sidney S. Culbert
Sidney S. Culbert
Sidney Spence Culbert was a linguist, psychologist and Esperantist. Born in Miles City, Montana, Culbert moved to Tacoma, Washington with his family in 1923 and lived in Tacoma and Seattle for most of his life....
's widely cited estimate of 1.6 million speakers is controversial).
Jespersen, who was present during the ten days of Committee deliberations in Paris and later served as part of the permanent Commission, wrote a history of Ido.
A number of Esperanto supporters have attacked Ido over the years. The Esperantist Don Harlow
Don Harlow
Donald Harlow was an active Esperantist and former president of Esperanto-USA , and also former editor of ELNA's magazine Esperanto USA. He authored a self-published book on the Esperanto movement, The Esperanto Book, which is...
has characterized Ido's founders as underhanded and conspiratorial; see also Emile Boirac's report in the list of external links; also Gaston Waringhien's “Kulisaj manovroj” (Maneuvers in the Wings) in his 1887 kaj la sekvo, Antwerp: Stafeto, 1980. However, most Ido partisans argue that Harlow's history is polemical and is not consistent with all the eyewitness accounts, such as those reported by Jespersen. Harlow bases his account on material from some other eyewitnesses such as Emile Boirac
Émile Boirac
Émile Boirac was a French philosopher, parapsychologist, promoter of Esperanto and writer.-Biography:...
and Gaston Moch
Gaston Moch
Gaston Moch was the secretary of the Esperantist Centra Oficejo and a member of the Lingva Komitato.Moch was born in Saint-Cyr-l'École, Yvelines. He was the Son of French Jewish Military officer, Col. Jules Moch, co-founder of "The Club Millitare" during the time when French Jews were entering the...
and with other source documentation (such as Zamenhof's correspondence with Couturat and others during the period, as published in the two-volume Leteroj de Zamenhof, Paris: SAT, 1948), to which Jespersen, according to Harlow, would not have had access.
Comparison with Esperanto
Ido inherits many features of the grammar of EsperantoEsperanto grammar
Esperanto is a constructed auxiliary language. A highly regular grammar makes Esperanto much easier to learn than most other languages of the world, though particular features may be more or less advantageous or difficult depending on the language background of the speaker...
, and in many cases, the vocabulary is similar. Ido shares with Esperanto the goals of grammatical simplicity and consistency, ease of learning, and the use of loanword
Loanword
A loanword is a word borrowed from a donor language and incorporated into a recipient language. By contrast, a calque or loan translation is a related concept where the meaning or idiom is borrowed rather than the lexical item itself. The word loanword is itself a calque of the German Lehnwort,...
s from various European languages. The two languages, to a great extent, are mutually intelligible. However, certain changes were introduced to address some of the concerns that had arisen about Esperanto. These include:
- Esperanto's alphabetEsperanto orthographyEsperanto is written in a Latin alphabet of twenty-eight letters, with upper and lower case. This is supplemented by punctuation marks and by various logograms, such as the numerals 0–9, currency signs such as $, and mathematical symbols....
uses six non-Latin letters, three of which are not found in any other existing language; as a result, Esperanto in typing and in Internet e-mail and newsgroups frequently resorts to any of several schemes to represent these special letters. This leads to the situation where the same word may be displayed any of several different ways. Ido addresses this issue by using the 26-letter Latin alphabetLatin alphabetThe Latin alphabet, also called the Roman alphabet, is the most recognized alphabet used in the world today. It evolved from a western variety of the Greek alphabet called the Cumaean alphabet, which was adopted and modified by the Etruscans who ruled early Rome...
with two digraphsDigraph (orthography)A digraph or digram is a pair of characters used to write one phoneme or a sequence of phonemes that does not correspond to the normal values of the two characters combined...
, ch (/t͡ʃ/) and sh (/ʃ/) instead of Esperanto's ĉ and ŝ. The digraph qu, representing /kw/, as in English "quick", is used instead of Esperanto kv, and likewise gu is used instead of gv. Ido orthographyOrthographyThe orthography of a language specifies a standardized way of using a specific writing system to write the language. Where more than one writing system is used for a language, for example Kurdish, Uyghur, Serbian or Inuktitut, there can be more than one orthography...
is phonemicPhonemic orthographyA phonemic orthography is a writing system where the written graphemes correspond to phonemes, the spoken sounds of the language. In terms of orthographic depth, these are termed shallow orthographies, contrasting with deep orthographies...
in the sense that each written word has an unambiguous pronunciation, but it does not have the one-to-one correspondence between letters and phonemePhonemeIn a language or dialect, a phoneme is the smallest segmental unit of sound employed to form meaningful contrasts between utterances....
s that Esperanto has. - Ido generally does not impose rules of grammatical agreementAgreement (linguistics)In languages, agreement or concord is a form of cross-reference between different parts of a sentence or phrase. Agreement happens when a word changes form depending on the other words to which it relates....
between grammatical categories within a sentence, believing them to be grammatically complex and redundant in a potential universal second language. For example, in Esperanto, the verb in a sentence is invariable regardless of the number and person of the subject. This principle was not extended in Esperanto to adjectives and nouns; however, as a result, in Esperanto an adjective must agree in number and case with the noun it modifies as with the French grands livres (large books), where the adjective must be pluralized as well as the noun. There is no such requirement in English; for example, where number is emphasized by variation of the verb, and Ido eliminates this feature from its grammar. - Esperanto requires the use of the -n ending to signify the use of the accusative caseAccusative caseThe accusative case of a noun is the grammatical case used to mark the direct object of a transitive verb. The same case is used in many languages for the objects of prepositions...
. Ido allows the use of this feature in ambiguous situations where the object of a sentence does not follow the subject, but in all other situations, the accusative case was eliminated as redundant. - Ido imposes consistent rules on the use of endings to transform a word from one meaning or part of speech to another, thus simplifying the amount of vocabulary memorization that is necessary.
- Ido, unlike Esperanto, does not assume the male sex as the default for family relationship words. For example, Ido does not derive the word for "sister" by adding a feminine suffix to the word for "brother", as standard Esperanto does. Instead, some relationship root words are defined as sex neutral, and two different suffixes derive masculine- and feminine-specific words from the root—frato (sibling) > fratulo (brother), fratino (sister). In other cases, Ido has two or three root words where Esperanto has one—genitoro (parent), patro (father), matro (mother).
- Ido's vocabulary attempts to use cognateCognateIn linguistics, cognates are words that have a common etymological origin. This learned term derives from the Latin cognatus . Cognates within the same language are called doublets. Strictly speaking, loanwords from another language are usually not meant by the term, e.g...
s that are shared in common by as many of its six source languages (see below) as possible.
Nevertheless, modern Esperanto has received some influence from Ido in areas such as a clarification of the rules for word derivation and suffixes like -oz- ("abundant in") and -end- ("required to").
Phonology
Ido has the same typical five-vowel system (a, e, i, o, u roughly have their IPA values) as Esperanto, and most of the same consonants, omitting two consonant phonemePhoneme
In a language or dialect, a phoneme is the smallest segmental unit of sound employed to form meaningful contrasts between utterances....
s used by Esperanto, IPA: x and d͡ʒ. (The distinctions between x~h and between d͡ʒ~ʒ carry a very low functional load
Functional load
In linguistics and especially phonology, functional load refers to the importance of certain features in making distinctions in a language...
in Esperanto, and so were deemed to be unnecessary in Ido.) Without those two consonant phonemes, the consonants in the language are as follows:
| Bilabial Bilabial consonant In phonetics, a bilabial consonant is a consonant articulated with both lips. The bilabial consonants identified by the International Phonetic Alphabet are:... |
Labio- dental Labiodental consonant In phonetics, labiodentals are consonants articulated with the lower lip and the upper teeth.-Labiodental consonant in IPA:The labiodental consonants identified by the International Phonetic Alphabet are:... |
Alveolar Alveolar consonant Alveolar consonants are articulated with the tongue against or close to the superior alveolar ridge, which is called that because it contains the alveoli of the superior teeth... |
Post- alveolar Postalveolar consonant Postalveolar consonants are consonants articulated with the tongue near or touching the back of the alveolar ridge, further back in the mouth than the alveolar consonants, which are at the ridge itself, but not as far back as the hard palate... |
Palatal Palatal consonant Palatal consonants are consonants articulated with the body of the tongue raised against the hard palate... |
Velar Velar consonant Velars are consonants articulated with the back part of the tongue against the soft palate, the back part of the roof of the mouth, known also as the velum).... |
Glottal Glottal consonant Glottal consonants, also called laryngeal consonants, are consonants articulated with the glottis. Many phoneticians consider them, or at least the so-called fricative, to be transitional states of the glottis without a point of articulation as other consonants have; in fact, some do not consider... |
||||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Nasal Nasal consonant A nasal consonant is a type of consonant produced with a lowered velum in the mouth, allowing air to escape freely through the nose. Examples of nasal consonants in English are and , in words such as nose and mouth.- Definition :... |
m | n | ||||||||||||
| Plosive | p | b | t | d | k | ɡ | ||||||||
| Affricate Affricate consonant Affricates are consonants that begin as stops but release as a fricative rather than directly into the following vowel.- Samples :... |
t͡s | t͡ʃ | ||||||||||||
| Fricative Fricative consonant Fricatives are consonants produced by forcing air through a narrow channel made by placing two articulators close together. These may be the lower lip against the upper teeth, in the case of ; the back of the tongue against the soft palate, in the case of German , the final consonant of Bach; or... |
f | v | s | z | ʃ | ʒ | h | |||||||
| Tap Flap consonant In phonetics, a flap or tap is a type of consonantal sound, which is produced with a single contraction of the muscles so that one articulator is thrown against another.-Contrast with stops and trills:... |
ɾ | |||||||||||||
| Approximant | l | j | w | |||||||||||
The accent rule in Ido is regular, but slightly more complex than that of Esperanto: all polysyllables are stressed on the penultimate (next to last) syllable except for verb infinitive
Infinitive
In grammar, infinitive is the name for certain verb forms that exist in many languages. In the usual description of English, the infinitive of a verb is its basic form with or without the particle to: therefore, do and to do, be and to be, and so on are infinitives...
s, which are stressed on the ultimate syllable—skolo, kafeo and lernas for "school", "coffee" and "learn(s)/am, is, are learning" (present tense), but irar, savar and drinkar for "to go", "to know" and "to drink". If an i or u precedes another vowel, the pair is considered part of the same syllable when applying the accent rule—thus radio, familio and manuo for "radio", "family" and "hand", unless the two vowels are the only ones in the word, in which case the "i" or "u" is stressed: dio, frua for "day" and "early".
Orthography
Ido uses the same 26 letters of the Latin alphabet as English, though the values of some letters are different. Ido uses no diacriticDiacritic
A diacritic is a glyph added to a letter, or basic glyph. The term derives from the Greek διακριτικός . Diacritic is both an adjective and a noun, whereas diacritical is only an adjective. Some diacritical marks, such as the acute and grave are often called accents...
s.
| Letter | IPA | Esperanto | English |
|---|---|---|---|
| a | /a/ | a | most similar to a as in "father" |
| b | b | b | b |
| c | t͡s | c | ts in "cats" |
| d | d | d | d |
| e | /e/ | e | most similar to e as in "egg" |
| f | f | f | f |
| g | ɡ | g | hard g only as in "go" |
| h | h | h, | h |
| i | i | i | i as in "machine", ee in "bee" |
| j | ʒ | , | s as in "pleasure, measure" or g in "mirage, beige" |
| k | k | k | k as in "skin, skip" |
| l | l | l | most similar to l as in "lamb" |
| m | m | m | m |
| n | n | n | n |
| o | /o/ | o | most similar to o as in "or" |
| p | p | p | p as in "spin, spark" |
| r | ɾ | r | r (rolled Rolled R *alveolar trill, as in Spanish Roberto or perro.*alveolar tap, as in Spanish Roberto or pero.... ) |
| s | s | s | s |
| t | t | t | t |
| u | u | u | most similar to u as in "dude" or oo in "moon" |
| v | v | v | v |
| w | w | w | |
| x | /ks/ | kz | x |
| y | j | j | y |
| z | z | z | z |
In addition, Ido has three digraph
Digraph (orthography)
A digraph or digram is a pair of characters used to write one phoneme or a sequence of phonemes that does not correspond to the normal values of the two characters combined...
s:
| Digraph | IPA | Esperanto | English |
|---|---|---|---|
| ch | t͡ʃ | ch | |
| qu | /kw/ | kv | qu as in "quick" |
| sh | ʃ | sh |
Etymological Esperanto words containing , , kz, kv correspond to etymological Ido words spelled with h~k, j, x, qu, respectively, although the pronunciation of the spelling of the cognates differs in such cases.
Grammar
Each word in the Ido vocabulary is built from a root word. A word consists of a root and a grammatical ending. Other words can be formed from that word by removing the grammatical ending and adding a new one, or by inserting certain affixAffix
An affix is a morpheme that is attached to a word stem to form a new word. Affixes may be derivational, like English -ness and pre-, or inflectional, like English plural -s and past tense -ed. They are bound morphemes by definition; prefixes and suffixes may be separable affixes...
es between the root and the grammatical ending. As with Esperanto, Ido is grammatically invariable; there are no exceptions in Ido, unlike in natural languages.
Some of the grammatical endings are defined as follows:
| Grammatical form | Ido | | Esperanto | | English | ||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Singular noun Noun In linguistics, a noun is a member of a large, open lexical category whose members can occur as the main word in the subject of a clause, the object of a verb, or the object of a preposition .Lexical categories are defined in terms of how their members combine with other kinds of... |
-o (libro) | -o (libro) | book | ||
| Plural noun Noun In linguistics, a noun is a member of a large, open lexical category whose members can occur as the main word in the subject of a clause, the object of a verb, or the object of a preposition .Lexical categories are defined in terms of how their members combine with other kinds of... |
-i (libri) | -oj (libroj) | books | ||
| Adjective Adjective In grammar, an adjective is a 'describing' word; the main syntactic role of which is to qualify a noun or noun phrase, giving more information about the object signified.... |
-a (varma) | -a (varma) | warm | ||
| Adverb Adverb An adverb is a part of speech that modifies verbs or any part of speech other than a noun . Adverbs can modify verbs, adjectives , clauses, sentences, and other adverbs.... |
-e (varme) | -e (varme) | warmly | ||
| Present tense infinitive Infinitive In grammar, infinitive is the name for certain verb forms that exist in many languages. In the usual description of English, the infinitive of a verb is its basic form with or without the particle to: therefore, do and to do, be and to be, and so on are infinitives... |
-ar (irar) | -anti (iranti) | -i (iri) | to be going | to go |
| Past tense infinitive Infinitive In grammar, infinitive is the name for certain verb forms that exist in many languages. In the usual description of English, the infinitive of a verb is its basic form with or without the particle to: therefore, do and to do, be and to be, and so on are infinitives... |
-ir (irir) | -inti (irinti) | to have gone | ||
| Future tense infinitive Infinitive In grammar, infinitive is the name for certain verb forms that exist in many languages. In the usual description of English, the infinitive of a verb is its basic form with or without the particle to: therefore, do and to do, be and to be, and so on are infinitives... |
-or (iror) | -onti (ironti) | to be going to go | ||
| Present Present tense The present tense is a grammatical tense that locates a situation or event in present time. This linguistic definition refers to a concept that indicates a feature of the meaning of a verb... |
-as (iras) | -as (iras) | go, goes | ||
| Past Past tense The past tense is a grammatical tense that places an action or situation in the past of the current moment , or prior to some specified time that may be in the speaker's past, present, or future... |
-is (iris) | -is (iris) | went | ||
| Future Future tense In grammar, a future tense is a verb form that marks the event described by the verb as not having happened yet, but expected to happen in the future , or to happen subsequent to some other event, whether that is past, present, or future .-Expressions of future tense:The concept of the future,... |
-os (iros) | -os (iros) | will go | ||
| Imperative Imperative mood The imperative mood expresses commands or requests as a grammatical mood. These commands or requests urge the audience to act a certain way. It also may signal a prohibition, permission, or any other kind of exhortation.- Morphology :... |
-ez (irez) | -u (iru) | go! | ||
| Conditional Conditional mood In linguistics, the conditional mood is the inflectional form of the verb used in the independent clause of a conditional sentence to refer to a hypothetical state of affairs, or an uncertain event, that is contingent on another set of circumstances... |
-us (irus) | -us (irus) | would go | ||
These are the same as in Esperanto except for -i, -ir, -ar, -or and -ez. Esperanto marks noun plurals by an agglutinative ending -j (so plural nouns end in -oj), uses -i for verb infinitives (Esperanto infinitives are tenseless), and uses -u for the imperative. Verbs in Ido do not conjugate depending on person, number or gender; the -as, -is, and -os endings suffice whether the subject is I, you, he, she, they, or anything else.
Syntax
Ido word order is generally the same as English (subject–verb–object), so the sentence Me havas la blua libro is the same as the English "I have the blue book", both in meaning and word order. There are a few differences, however:- Adjectives can precede the noun as in English, or follow the noun as in SpanishSpanish languageSpanish , also known as Castilian , is a Romance language in the Ibero-Romance group that evolved from several languages and dialects in central-northern Iberia around the 9th century and gradually spread with the expansion of the Kingdom of Castile into central and southern Iberia during the...
. Thus, Me havas la libro blua is also permissible. - Ido has the optional -n accusative ending that is used when the object of the sentence is not clear, or it may be used to alter word order when desired. La blua libron me havas is another acceptable way of saying the same thing.
Negation occurs in Ido by simply affixing ne to the front of a verb: Me ne havas libro means, "I do not have a book". This as well does not vary, and thus the "I do not", "He does not", "They do not" before a verb are simply Me ne, Il ne, and Li ne. In the same way, past tense and future tense negatives are formed by ne in front of the conjugated verb. "I will not go" and "I did not go" become Me ne iros and Me ne iris respectively.
Yes/no questions are formed by the particle ka in front of the question. "I have a book" (me havas libro) becomes Ka me havas libro? (do I have a book?). Ka can also be placed in front of a noun without a verb to make a simple question, corresponding to the English "is it?" Ka Mark? can mean, "Are you Mark?", "Is it Mark?", "Do you mean Mark?" depending on the context.
Pronouns
The pronounPronoun
In linguistics and grammar, a pronoun is a pro-form that substitutes for a noun , such as, in English, the words it and he...
s of Ido were revised to make them more acoustically distinct than those of Esperanto, which all end in i. Especially the singular and plural first-person pronouns mi and ni may be difficult to distinguish in a noisy environment, so Ido has me and ni instead. Ido also distinguishes between intimate (tu) and formal (vu)
T-V distinction
In sociolinguistics, a T–V distinction is a contrast, within one language, between second-person pronouns that are specialized for varying levels of politeness, social distance, courtesy, familiarity, or insult toward the addressee....
second-person singular pronouns as well as plural second-person pronouns (vi) not marked for intimacy. Furthermore, Ido has a pan-gender third-person pronoun lu (it can mean "he", "she", or "it", depending on the context) in addition to its masculine (il), feminine (el), and neuter (ol) third-person pronouns.
| singular | plural | indefinite | ||||||||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| first | second | third | first | second | third | |||||||||
| familiar | formal | masculine | feminine | neuter | pan-gender | masculine | feminine | neuter | pan-gender | |||||
| English | I | thou/you | you | he | she | it | he/she/it | we | you | they | one | |||
| Esperanto | mi | ci¹ | vi¹ | li | ŝi | ĝi | ĝi² | ni | vi | ili | oni | |||
| Ido | me | tu | vu | il(u) | el(u) | ol(u) | lu | ni | vi | ili | eli | oli | li | on(u) |
- ci, while technically the familiar form of the word "you" in Esperanto, is almost never used. Results on Google have shown that while tu is only slightly less common than vu in Ido, ci is used less than half of one percent of the amount vi is in Esperanto. Esperanto's inventor himself did not include the pronoun in the first book on Esperanto and only later reluctantly; later he recommended against using ci on the grounds that different cultures have conflicting traditions regarding the use of the familiar and formal forms of "you", and that a universal language should avoid the problem by simply using the formal form in all situations. Unlike some other languages that use a formal second person pronoun, vi is not capitalized.
- tiu, though not a personal pronoun, is usually used in this circumstance, because many people have a hard time applying "it" to humans.
It should be noted that ol, like English it and Esperanto ĝi, is not limited to inanimate objects, but can be used "for entities whose sex is indeterminate: babies, children, humans, youths, elders, people, individuals, horses, cows, cats, etc."
Lu is often mistakenly labeled an epicene
Epicene
Epicene is an adjective for loss of gender distinction, often specific loss of masculinity. It includes:* effeminacy — a man with characteristics that are traditionally feminine...
pronoun, that is, one that refers to both masculine and feminine beings, but in fact, lu is more properly a "pan-gender" pronoun, as it is also used for referring to inanimate objects. From Kompleta Gramatiko Detaloza di la Linguo Internaciona Ido by Beaufront:
Lu (like li) is used for all three genders. That lu does duty for the three genders at will in the singular is not in itself any more astonishing than seeing li serve the three genders at will in the plural ... By a decision (1558) the Idist Academy rejected every restriction concerning the use of lu. One may thus use that pronoun in exactly the same way for a thing and a person of obvious sex as for animals of unknown sex and a person that has a genderless name, like baby, child, human, etc., these being as truly masculine as feminine.
The motives for this decision were given in "Mondo", XI, 68: Lu for the singular is exactly the same as li for the plural. Logic, symmetry and ease demand this. Consequently, just as li may be used for people, animals, and things whenever nothing obliges one to express the gender, so lu may be used for people, animals, and things under the same condition. The proposed distinction would be a bothersome subtlety...
Vocabulary
Vocabulary in Ido is based on words intended to give the greatest facility to the most speakers. Early on, the first 5000+ roots were analyzed compared to the vocabulary of English, French, Spanish, German, Russian and Italian, and the following result was found:- 2024 roots (38%) belong to 6 languages
- 942 roots (17%) belong to 5 languages
- 1111 roots (21%) belong to 4 languages
- 585 roots (11%) belong to 3 languages
- 454 roots (8%) belong to 2 languages
- 255 roots (5%) belong to 1 language
- Total 5371 100%
In addition, a comparison of Ido vocabulary to the six shows the following for the similarities of Ido to the six languages above:
- French 4880: 91%
- Italian 4454: 83%
- Spanish 4237: 79%
- English 4219: 79%
- German 3302: 61%
- Russian 2821: 52%
This is consistent with the fact that Ido is sometimes mistaken for French, Italian or Spanish at first sight.
Comparison of vocabulary with the six languages:
| Ido | English | Italian | French | German | Russian | Spanish |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| bona | good ("bonus") | buono | bon | gut ("Bonus") | khoroshiy (хороший) | bueno |
| donar | give ("donate") | dare ("donare") | donner | geben | darit (дарить) | dar, donar |
| filtrar | filter | filtrare | filtrer | filtern | filtrovat (фильтровать) | filtrar |
| gardeno | garden | giardino | jardin | Garten | sad (caд) | jardín |
| kavalo | horse ("cavalry") | cavallo | cheval | Pferd ("Kavallerie") | loshad, kobyla (лошадь, кобыла) | caballo |
| maro | sea ("marine") | mare | mer | Meer | more (море) | mar |
| naciono | nation | nazione | nation | Nation | natsija (нация) | nación |
| studiar | study | studiare | étudier | studieren | izuchat, (изучать) | estudiar |
| yuna | young ("juvenile") | giovane | jeune | jung | yunyi, molodoy (юный, молодой) | joven |
Vocabulary in Ido is often created through a number of official prefixes and suffixes that alter the meaning of the word. This allows a user to take existing words and modify them to create neologisms when necessary, and allows for a wide range of expression without the need to learn new vocabulary each time. Though their number is too large to be included in one article, some examples include:
- The diminutive suffix -et-. Domo (house) becomes dometo (cottage), and libro (book) becomes libreto (novelette or short story).
- The pejorative suffix -ach-. Domo becomes domacho (hovel), and libro becomes libracho (a shoddy piece of work, pulp fiction, etc.)
- The prefix retro-, which implies a reversal. Irar (to go) becomes retroirar (to go back, backward) and venar (to come) becomes retrovenar (to return).
New vocabulary is generally created through an analysis of the word, its etymology
Etymology
Etymology is the study of the history of words, their origins, and how their form and meaning have changed over time.For languages with a long written history, etymologists make use of texts in these languages and texts about the languages to gather knowledge about how words were used during...
, and reference to the six source languages. If a word can be created through vocabulary already existing in the language then it will usually be adopted without need for a new radical (such as wikipedio for Wikipedia, which consists of wiki + enciklopedio for encyclopedia), and if not an entirely new word will be created. The word alternatoro for example was adopted in 1926, likely because five of the six source languages used largely the same orthography
Orthography
The orthography of a language specifies a standardized way of using a specific writing system to write the language. Where more than one writing system is used for a language, for example Kurdish, Uyghur, Serbian or Inuktitut, there can be more than one orthography...
for the word, and because it was long enough to avoid being mistaken for other words in the existing vocabulary. Adoption of a word is done through consensus, after which the word will be made official by the union
Uniono por la Linguo Internaciona Ido
Uniono por la Linguo Internaciona Ido , the Union for the International Language Ido, is the official union of the Ido-language movement...
. Care must also be taken to avoid homonym
Homonym
In linguistics, a homonym is, in the strict sense, one of a group of words that often but not necessarily share the same spelling and the same pronunciation but have different meanings...
s if possible, and usually a new word undergoes some discussion before being adopted. Foreign words that have a restricted sense and are not likely to be used in everyday life (such as the word intifada to refer to the conflict between Israel
Israel
The State of Israel is a parliamentary republic located in the Middle East, along the eastern shore of the Mediterranean Sea...
and Palestine
Palestinian territories
The Palestinian territories comprise the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. Since the Palestinian Declaration of Independence in 1988, the region is today recognized by three-quarters of the world's countries as the State of Palestine or simply Palestine, although this status is not recognized by the...
) are left untouched, and often written in italics.
Ido-speaking community
As with all constructed languages, gauging the number of speakers of Ido is an extremely difficult task. UsenetUsenet
Usenet is a worldwide distributed Internet discussion system. It developed from the general purpose UUCP architecture of the same name.Duke University graduate students Tom Truscott and Jim Ellis conceived the idea in 1979 and it was established in 1980...
postings by the prominent Esperantist Don Harlow
Don Harlow
Donald Harlow was an active Esperantist and former president of Esperanto-USA , and also former editor of ELNA's magazine Esperanto USA. He authored a self-published book on the Esperanto movement, The Esperanto Book, which is...
have estimated the population at being somewhere in the thousands, but no accurate numbers exist. Moreover, given the often political IAL environment in which those that speak a language are not merely language users but adherents to its system and linguistic philosophy as well, there are two categories of those that know the language, Ido speakers and Ido supporters. Ido resembles Esperanto to a large extent, and many Esperantists have learned Ido out of curiosity while still not using it, preferring to support the more well-known Esperanto movement instead. One Esperanto bulletin board included the following:
It is possible to find discussions of this nature on the Internet in English, Esperanto, Ido, Interlingua and other IALs, each understanding the other with little problem.
A number of Esperantists viewed the schism of Ido as a mixed blessing, and a number of writings show that some were inversely glad to see those who were interested only in creating a perfect language by constantly reforming it leave the fold so that those remaining could work on using and promoting the language itself. However, these "constant reformers" eventually moved on to other reform projects, few of which survived much beyond the deaths of the authors themselves, and Ido has remained constant since then—it is safe to say that were Ido a community of language reformers during its early days, that this is not the case anymore.
A small sample of 24 Idists on the Yahoo!
Yahoo!
Yahoo! Inc. is an American multinational internet corporation headquartered in Sunnyvale, California, United States. The company is perhaps best known for its web portal, search engine , Yahoo! Directory, Yahoo! Mail, Yahoo! News, Yahoo! Groups, Yahoo! Answers, advertising, online mapping ,...
group Idolisto during late 2005 showed that 57% had begun their studies of the language during the past three years, 32% from the mid-1990s to 2002, and 8% had known the language from before.
La Princeto (The Little Prince)
- Chapter 17 of The Little PrinceThe Little PrinceThe Little Prince , first published in 1943, is a novella and the most famous work of the French aristocrat writer, poet and pioneering aviator Antoine de Saint-Exupéry ....
; the conversation between the Little Prince and the snake upon his arrival on Earth. The title of the Ido-language version is La Princeto.
CHAPITRO XVII
- –Bona nokto ! –dicis la surprizata princeto.
- –Bona nokto ! –dicis la serpento.
- –Adsur qua planeto me falis ? –questionis la princeto.
- –Adsur Tero, sur Afrika. –respondis la serpento.
- –Ha !... Kad esas nulu sur Tero ?
- –To esas la dezerto, e nulu esas sur la dezerti. Tero esas tre granda –dicis la serpento.
- La princeto sideskis sur stono e levis lua okuli a la cielo.
- –Me questionas a me –lu dicis- ka la steli intence brilas por ke uladie singlu povez trovar sua stelo. Videz mea planeto, olu esas exakte super ni... ma tre fore !
- –Olu esas bela planeto –dicis la serpento-. Por quo vu venis adhike ?
- –Esas chagreneto inter floro e me –dicis la princeto.
- –Ha ! –dicis la serpento.
- E la du permanis silence.
- –Ube esas la personi ? –klamis fine la princeto-. Onu esas kelke sola sur la dezerto...
- –Inter la personi onu anke esas sola –dicis la serpento.
- La princeto regardis la serpento longatempe.
- –Vu esas stranja animalo ! –dicis la princeto-. Vu esas tam tenua kam fingro...
- –Yes, ma me esas plu potenta kam fingro di rejo –dicis la serpento.
- La princeto ridetis.
- –Me ne kredas ke vu esas tre potenta, mem vu ne havas pedi... nek vu povas voyajar...
- –Me povas transportar vu plu fore kam navo -dicis la serpento.
- Ed olu spulis la maleolo di la princeto, same kam ora braceleto.
- –Ta quan me tushas retroiras a la tero deube lu venis. Ma vu esas pura e vu venas de stelo...
- La princeto nulon respondis.
- –Me kompatas vu, qua esas tante sola sur ta harda granita Tero. Me povas helpar vu se vu sentas nostalgio a vua planeto. Me povas...
- –Ho ! –dicis la princeto-. Me bone komprenis, ma pro quo vu sempre parolas enigmatoze ?
- –Me solvas omna enigmati –dicis la serpento.
- E la du permanis silence.
- Averto lektenda
- La verko La princeto licencesas sub Creative Commons License, http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/2.0/legalcode
- Autoro.- Fernando Tejón, krayono@yahoo.es
- Ret-pagino.- http://web.archive.org/web/20080529180727/http://es.geocities.com/idohispania/laprinceto/laprinceto.html
Mea vido-cirklo (horizonto)
Translation of tune by Russian bard Alexander SukhanovAlexander Sukhanov
Alexander Alekseevich Sukhanov is a Soviet and Russian composer and bard — he wrote nearly one hundred fifty songs. Professionally, Sukhanov is a mathematician.- Biography :...
from verses by Russian poet Yunna Morits
Yunna Morits
Yunna Morits , is a Soviet and Russian artist of many talents primarily known as a poet, was born in Kiev, USSR in a Jewish family. Her father Pinchas Moritz, was imprisoned under Stalin, she suffered from tuberculosis in her childhood, and spent years of hardship in the Urals during WWII...
.
(listen)
- Me nule savas la Angla, la Franca, la Greka,
- Mea vid-cirklo do restas sat mikra e streta -
- En mea vid-cirklo trovesas nur flori, arbori,
- Nur tero e maro, aero, fairo, amoro.
- Me nule savas la Dana e la Portugala,
- Mea vid-cirklo restas sat infantala -
- Nur joyi rapide pasant', bruligiva aflikto,
- Nur esperi, e timi noktal' es en mea vid-cirklo.
- Me savas nek la Sanskrito e nek la Latina,
- Mea vid-cirklo es ancien-mod' quale tino
- Nur morto e nasko homala, nur grani ed astri
- Aden mea vid-cirklo penetras e standas sat mastre.
- Mea savo artala esas fakultativa.
- Mea vid-cirklo restas presk' primitiva -
- En olu es nia afero intima, interna
- Por ke kun homaro la Tero flugadez eterne.
- Mea vid-cirklon restriktas nur timi, esperi,
- En olu trovesas nur amo, nur maro e tero.
- Aden mea vid-cirklo penetras e standas sat mastre
- Nur morto e nasko homala, nur grani ed astri.
Literature and publications
Ido has a number of publications that can be subscribed to or downloaded for free in most cases. Kuriero Internaciona is a magazine produced in France every few months with a range of topics. Adavane! is a magazine produced by the Spanish Ido Society every two months that has a range of topics, as well as a few dozen pages of work translated from other languages. Progreso is the official organ of the Ido movement and has been around since the inception of the movement in 1908. Other sites can be found with various stories, fables or proverbs along with a few books of the Bible translated into Ido on a smaller scale. The site publikaji has a few podcasts in Ido along with various songs and other recorded material.The online encyclopedia Wikipedia
Wikipedia
Wikipedia is a free, web-based, collaborative, multilingual encyclopedia project supported by the non-profit Wikimedia Foundation. Its 20 million articles have been written collaboratively by volunteers around the world. Almost all of its articles can be edited by anyone with access to the site,...
includes an Ido-language edition (known in Ido as Wikipedio); , it has over 18,000 articles.
Recent and upcoming international Ido conventions
- 2011: EchternachEchternachEchternach is a commune with city status in the canton of Echternach, which is part of the district of Grevenmacher, in eastern Luxembourg. Echternach lies near the border with Germany, and is the oldest town in Luxembourg....
, LuxembourgLuxembourgLuxembourg , officially the Grand Duchy of Luxembourg , is a landlocked country in western Europe, bordered by Belgium, France, and Germany. It has two principal regions: the Oesling in the North as part of the Ardennes massif, and the Gutland in the south...
(Information) - 2010: TübingenTübingenTübingen is a traditional university town in central Baden-Württemberg, Germany. It is situated south of the state capital, Stuttgart, on a ridge between the Neckar and Ammer rivers.-Geography:...
, GermanyGermanyGermany , officially the Federal Republic of Germany , is a federal parliamentary republic in Europe. The country consists of 16 states while the capital and largest city is Berlin. Germany covers an area of 357,021 km2 and has a largely temperate seasonal climate...
(Information) - 2009: TallinnTallinnTallinn is the capital and largest city of Estonia. It occupies an area of with a population of 414,940. It is situated on the northern coast of the country, on the banks of the Gulf of Finland, south of Helsinki, east of Stockholm and west of Saint Petersburg. Tallinn's Old Town is in the list...
, EstoniaEstoniaEstonia , officially the Republic of Estonia , is a state in the Baltic region of Northern Europe. It is bordered to the north by the Gulf of Finland, to the west by the Baltic Sea, to the south by Latvia , and to the east by Lake Peipsi and the Russian Federation . Across the Baltic Sea lies...
(Information) - 2008: WuppertalWuppertalWuppertal is a city in North Rhine-Westphalia, Germany. It is located in and around the Wupper river valley, and is situated east of the city of Düsseldorf and south of the Ruhr area. With a population of approximately 350,000, it is the largest city in the Bergisches Land...
-Neviges, Germany, participants from 5 countries (Information) - 2007: ParisParisParis is the capital and largest city in France, situated on the river Seine, in northern France, at the heart of the Île-de-France region...
, FranceFranceThe French Republic , The French Republic , The French Republic , (commonly known as France , is a unitary semi-presidential republic in Western Europe with several overseas territories and islands located on other continents and in the Indian, Pacific, and Atlantic oceans. Metropolitan France...
, 14 participants from 9 countries (Information, Photo) - 2006: BerlinBerlinBerlin is the capital city of Germany and is one of the 16 states of Germany. With a population of 3.45 million people, Berlin is Germany's largest city. It is the second most populous city proper and the seventh most populous urban area in the European Union...
, Germany, approx. 25 participants from 10 countries (Raporto) - 2005: ToulouseToulouseToulouse is a city in the Haute-Garonne department in southwestern FranceIt lies on the banks of the River Garonne, 590 km away from Paris and half-way between the Atlantic Ocean and the Mediterranean Sea...
, France, 13 participants from 4 countries (Raporto) - 2004: KievKievKiev or Kyiv is the capital and the largest city of Ukraine, located in the north central part of the country on the Dnieper River. The population as of the 2001 census was 2,611,300. However, higher numbers have been cited in the press....
, UkraineUkraineUkraine is a country in Eastern Europe. It has an area of 603,628 km², making it the second largest contiguous country on the European continent, after Russia...
, 17 participants from 9 countries (Raporto) - 2003: GroßbothenGroßbothenGroßbothen is a village and a former municipality in the Leipzig district in Saxony, Germany. Großbothen had an area of 33.45 km² and a population of 3,568 . At a local government reform on 1 January 2011, the municipality was split up and divided over the towns Grimma and Colditz. The village...
, Germany, participants from 6 countries (Raporto) - 2002: KrakówKrakówKraków also Krakow, or Cracow , is the second largest and one of the oldest cities in Poland. Situated on the Vistula River in the Lesser Poland region, the city dates back to the 7th century. Kraków has traditionally been one of the leading centres of Polish academic, cultural, and artistic life...
, PolandPolandPoland , officially the Republic of Poland , is a country in Central Europe bordered by Germany to the west; the Czech Republic and Slovakia to the south; Ukraine, Belarus and Lithuania to the east; and the Baltic Sea and Kaliningrad Oblast, a Russian exclave, to the north...
, 14 participants from 6 countries (Raporto) - 2001: NurembergNurembergNuremberg[p] is a city in the German state of Bavaria, in the administrative region of Middle Franconia. Situated on the Pegnitz river and the Rhine–Main–Danube Canal, it is located about north of Munich and is Franconia's largest city. The population is 505,664...
, Germany, 14 participants from 5 countries (Raporto) - 1998: Białobrzegi, Poland, 15 participants from 6 countries
- 1997: Bakkum (mun. CastricumCastricumCastricum is a municipality and a town in the Netherlands, in the province of North Holland.Castricum is a tourist attraction in the province North Holland...
), NetherlandsNetherlandsThe Netherlands is a constituent country of the Kingdom of the Netherlands, located mainly in North-West Europe and with several islands in the Caribbean. Mainland Netherlands borders the North Sea to the north and west, Belgium to the south, and Germany to the east, and shares maritime borders...
, 19 participants from 7 countries - 1995: ElsnigkElsnigkElsnigk is a village and a former municipality in the district of Anhalt-Bitterfeld, in Saxony-Anhalt, Germany. Since 1 January 2010, it is part of the municipality Osternienburger Land....
, Germany - 1991: OstendOstendOstend is a Belgian city and municipality located in the Flemish province of West Flanders. It comprises the boroughs of Mariakerke , Stene and Zandvoorde, and the city of Ostend proper – the largest on the Belgian coast....
, BelgiumBelgiumBelgium , officially the Kingdom of Belgium, is a federal state in Western Europe. It is a founding member of the European Union and hosts the EU's headquarters, and those of several other major international organisations such as NATO.Belgium is also a member of, or affiliated to, many...
, 21 participants - 1980: NamurNamur (city)Namur is a city and municipality in Wallonia, in southern Belgium. It is both the capital of the province of Namur and of Wallonia....
, Belgium, 35 participants - 1960: ZürichZürichZurich is the largest city in Switzerland and the capital of the canton of Zurich. It is located in central Switzerland at the northwestern tip of Lake Zurich...
, SwitzerlandSwitzerlandSwitzerland name of one of the Swiss cantons. ; ; ; or ), in its full name the Swiss Confederation , is a federal republic consisting of 26 cantons, with Bern as the seat of the federal authorities. The country is situated in Western Europe,Or Central Europe depending on the definition....
, ca. 50 participants
External links
Overview and answers to common questions
- International Language Ido
- Ido for all - English course for learning Ido
- Ido shortly - the first step towards the ideal language
History and opinions on Ido
- Langmaker.com about Ido
- Otto Jespersen's history of Ido
- Another history of Ido
- Emile Boirac's "Report to the World Esperanto Congress, 1908" about his experiences as part of the Delegation's Committee
- Léopold Leau's "The Truth About the Delegation in 1907", a rebuttal of criticisms made about the events of the Delegation, based on his own experiences as a member of the Delegation
- Richard Dalton's "Ido - Improved Esperanto or Confidence Trick", a 2008 criticism of Ido based on contemporary knowledge of its history
- "How to Build a Language", the section about Ido, and "Ido: The Beginning" by Don Harlow
- Ido-Pagino da Ailanto - Discussion about Ido, links to websites, organizations, mailing lists, courses, dictionaries, grammars, etc.
- Blueprints for Babel: Ido - Commentary and grammatical summary of Ido, with glossary and links
Pages in Ido and places to learn the language
- Uniono por la Linguo Internaciona Ido (ULI)
- English course for learning Ido: Ido for all and Ido shortly
- Ido resources at ChatAhoy.com, including:
- Ido-English Dyer dictionaries,
- an Ido for All course,
- as well as a mobile-friendly Ido for All course for handheld devices.
- Simple Ido-English dictionary is Elektronala multilinguala dicionario de la linguo Ido
- "Ido for All", a course for English speakers, can be found in pdf form at http://idomondo.org/nova-skolo.zip . A partial translation into French can be found at http://www.ido-vivo.info/Francaidokurso/ . MP3 files for lessons 1–7 can be found at http://www.iolairweb.co.uk/ido/idoforall.htm.
- Parolez Ido: Beta version of a social network in Ido
- Kompleta Gramatiko Detaloza di la Linguo Internaciona Ido (HTML)
- A much larger list of sites in Ido and about Ido in 33 other languages can be found on the Ido Wikipedia.
- Ekofin, a blog in Ido dealing with economics and finance. Also a fourth-year dissertation on the influence of relationship banking on competition in the banking sector in Ido by the same author
- Dyer Dictionary - the entire Dyer Ido-English/English-Ido Dictionary online
- Webster's Ido-English Dictionary