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Authors: Ben K. <benk@tilde.team>
Date: 2021-03-29
gemini://idiomdrottning.org/ido-vs-esperanto
Great post here comparing the two languages. I have known about Ido since I began learning Esperanto in 2015 because while I was learning Esperanto I also read a lot *about* it and its history. To me that was as equally fascinating as the language itself, which completely took a hold of me once I began to really learn it. (Admittedly, Esperanto didn't appeal to me that much on the surface, but my intrigue grew the more I learned it.)
So, I never gave Ido a chance. There's probably a few reasons for that, but when I checked it out the first time, my initial impression was that it's someone's idea of how to improve Esperanto, but somehow they made it worse. I don't know if that's really the case because I never truly learned Ido in order to be qualified to say. I do know that it has a few vocabulary words that are nicer than Esperanto's, like the infamous "sci-" root for to know is replaced by "se-" in Ido. Touché, Ido.
Also, a funny fact is that I always had a problem with Esperanto's word for "projector", which is "projekciilo". The agglutination makes sense, but I should note that I was already an advanced Esperanto speaker when I learned that word and it threw me off. Somehow Ido got to go with the more practical "projektoro".
Regarding the alphabet, I totally feel what they wrote about Esperanto's being better. Absolutely the same sentiment here. It looks beautiful, and it's efficient because of the one-letter-one-sound thing. I also prefer that it uses the letter J for the actual /j/ sound, which is more true/original to the Latin alphabet as well as speaking to Esperanto's Eastern European origins. I would not have it any other way.
As for the x-sistemo, I am also not really in favor of it. I was taught the x-sistemo first, as people seem to prefer it for being absolutely unambiguous. ("x" isn't a letter in Esperanto so it can be reserved exclusively for digraphs.) However, over time I came to appreciate the h-sistemo more, which I believe Zamenhof himself proposed and the UEA and some other serious people even still use it. Sadly, it still has "hh", which is kind of awful, but the letter is rare in Esperanto anyway, and I'd probably prefer "gh" to "gx", plus you get "sh" and "ch" which should make some people happy.
All that being said, I don't have anything against Ido, but you can guess why I chose Esperanto. It was there on Duolingo, it was there on Google Translate, my systems have keyboards for it, resources are plentiful, I became part of a big speaker community, and so on... Ido has too few users/speakers, but on the other hand if I like a language I can ignore that. After all, I studied High Valyrian before, and I'm confident it has zero speakers. (To be fair, it's not meant to have speakers.)
I once joined Ido's official (I guess) Telegram group, and it was quite small. If memory serves correct it was less than 100 people, while the Esperanto group was nearly 1500. Many of the active users I saw chatting in the Ido group were well known Esperantists, who probably learned and use Ido for fun. (And why not!)
One thing that generally holds true is that most people in the world who know any other conlang besides Esperanto also know Esperanto because they learned it first. Unfortunately, that also has the consequence of lessening the usefulness of Ido, because if you want it to do for you what an IAL should do (help you connect to people from other countries who don't speak the same language as you), Esperanto enables that more. Of course, lots of other languages enable that more.
I beliee Esperanto is also still easier to use and learn than Ido. For advanced speakers it probably doesn't matter, but for learners I think Esperanto still has the edge, and the tabelvortoj help a lot, even though Ido purposefully avoided them. The hate put on Esperanto's correlatives seems to come from the crowd of people that felt Esperanto just isn't Romance enough, and maybe even wanted it to be more like French. Ido is more like French, isn't it?
The poster mentioned that they were told about Esperanto in middle school. Even that is amazing, since I was never told about it ever! Growing up I think I heard it mentioned once or twice somewhere. I don't remember so much. My grandfather talked about it sometimes, but only that he had heard about it, and it seems he didn't even know what its name was.
It seems at the end of their post they gave Esperanto a severely bad rating over what seems to be a misunderstanding about the word "Eŭropo". They claim that it's masculine, but it is not. Esperanto words don't have gender in any gramatical sense, so that's not part of the inflection. All nouns end in -o because it's a noun marker, so it's unrelated to gender. All adjectives end in -a, and that is just one of Esperanto's inventions. Words in Esperanto can have semantic gender, in other words a word can refer to something that is inherently male or female (like "man" or "woman"), but otherwise it's not a general feature of the language or its grammar. Words that have gender in their meaning in Esperanto are only a handful of words.
Esperanto is usually unfairly blamed for creating female terms based on male roots, like "virino" (woman) being the female version of "viro" (man). It's generally not often noted that the reverse has happened in the language more than once, as far as I know. The best example being "edzo", "husband", whose original form was "edzino"; its etymology is obscure, but it's said to have been borrowed from "rebbetzin" in Yiddish, for the wife for a Rabbi. In other words the word for "husband" is actually rooted in a word for "wife" and was modified to become male. I think the same thing probably happened with "fraŭlo" (unmarried male), which comes from "fraŭlino" (unmarried female), borrowed from German.
I wouldn't judge Esperanto badly for having gender at all, like "he/she" pronouns. My native language, English, is this way, and I do not hate English. I've also never heard of anyone rejecting English specifically for that reason, but Esperanto usually gets subjected to undue criticism because people aren't forced to accept it (as much), which in itself is a good thing. I'm not a big fan of linguistic hegemony, but it's a fact of life that we can't change.
Additionally, I have to admit that I never liked the "ri" proposal because I just think that the word sounds bad, and I just can't get over that. Conceptually, yes I would be totally happy with genderless pronouns. They work well in other languages I know like Persian and Turkish, so really there isn't really any reason for pronouns to have gender. I just wish this coud be applied in Esperanto in some way that I could enjoy. Nobody seems to like my preferred proposal for the pronoun "zi" (I don't know who first came up with it), and there are other potential approaches, like using "li" (genderless) for everybody. Not so different from Ido's "lu" then. Others like "tiu", which I think is closer to the language's roots. (That is to say, many languages, including Indo-European languages, developed third person pronouns out of older words meaning "this" or "that", since in their ancient form they lacked such pronouns entirely.)
Either way, the comparison between Ido and Esperanto was interesting, and the languages are so similar that it's no surprise that they come out nearly evenly matched. Maybe one day I will try to pick up Ido and see how much fun I can have with it!
I would like to hear more explanation about Ido's grammatical features being nice (like the antonym thing), preferrably with examples. I actually have no idea how Ido forms antonyms, so that is a mystery to me. When it comes to the infinitive and imperative form in Esperanto, I actually found that very nice and intuitive from the beginning. Yes, it's different from Romance languages, but it's not bad. I think Ido just tries to be more standard Romance-like, perhaps putting it in a similar vain as a language like Interlingua.