Ido
Ido is a reformed version of the artificial language Esperanto.
It was developed in the early 1900s, and still has a following today, primarily in Europe.
Ido inherits many of the same grammatical features of Esperanto, 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 loan words from various European languages. However, certain changes were introduced to address some of the concerns that had arisen about Esperanto. These include:
- Esperanto's alphabet uses six new letters which are not found in any existing language; as a result, printed Esperanto frequently resorts to any of several schemes to represent these special letters. This leads to the situation where the same word may be spelled any of several different ways. Ido addresses this issue by using the standard 26-letter alphabet.
- For reasons of grammatical simplicity, Esperanto generally does not impose rules of grammatical agreement between grammatical categories within a sentence, since these are redundant. For example, in Esperanto, the verb in a sentence is invariable regardless of the number and person of the subject. But this principle was not extended in Esperanto to adjectives and nouns; as a result, in Esperanto, an adjective must agree in number and case with the noun it modifies. There is no such requirement in English, for example, and Ido eliminates this complication from its grammar.
- Esperanto requires the use of the -n ending to signify the use of the accusative case. 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 tranform 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 gender as the default, and thus does not, for example, define a sister as a female-brother, as Esperanto does.
- The Ido vocabulary attempts to share cognates with as many of the major European languages as possible.
Grammar
Each word in the Ido vocabulary is built from a root word. A root word consist 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 affixes between the root and the grammatical ending. Ido is grammatically invariable; there are no exceptions in Ido, unlike in natural languages.
Some of the grammatical endings are defined as follows:
- -o : noun
- -a : adjective
- -e : adverb
- -ar : verb infinitive
- -as : verb, present tense
- -is : verb, past tense
- -os : verb, future tense
much more about Ido grammar can be explained here, such as pronouns, affixes, references to the history of the language
History
Various parties who were interested in the subject of artificial languages convened the Delegation for the Adoption of an International Auxiliary Language in Paris in 1907 to discuss the adoption of a standard international language among the various competitors that had been devised up to that time. The committee decided that no language was completely acceptable, but that Esperanto could be accepted if certain modifications were adopted. Out of this project, the language Ido was ultimately developed.
The inventor of Esperanto, L. L. Zamenhof, as well as many of the language's supporters, resisted any effort at improving it, even though many of the reforms adopted by Ido were themselves suggested at one time by Zamenhof. The leading proponent of Ido, Louis Couterat, was killed in an automobile accident in 1914, thus dealing a serious blow to the movement. However, the language still has speakers today, and the internet has brought renewed interest in the language.
See [[1]] for a history of Ido as described by Otto Jespersen, a linguist who witnessed the events of the Delegation.
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