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Language Review: Ido

I'm surprised at the popularity of Ido in Geminispace:

gemini://tilde.pink/~emily/log/ido-and-toki-pona.gmi

gemini://idiomdrottning.org/ido-vs-esperanto

so I'll review Ido from the word-formation angle that's usually very rarely talked about.

Why Ido works

The key difference between Esperanto and Ido is the way words cross the boundaries between nouns, verbs and adjectives. It's about how you verb your nouns. In Esperanto this is more or less free-flowing, on "whatever makes sense" basis. Linguist René de Saussure observed how people actually talked and codified it in a set of rules which later became official. In Ido the rules for that were designed and imposed from the very beginning. This is Ido's both greatest blessing and the greatest curse.

In Esperanto, when you see, for example, a noun but with a verb ending - a "verbed noun" - you just have to guess what that means if you don't know already. Suppose you know that "akvo" is water; what is "akvi"? It should be "to water". But it's just the peculiarity of English that it means "to supply water to a plant". But why can't it mean "to make something wet"? or to liquify? or to wash? or to take bath? In this case, Esperanto agrees with English. But "aeri" - a verbed "aero" (air) - doesn't agree with English: it means to pump (air). And you're supposed to remember all that.

Ido sensibly decided to have none of this. In Ido, you can't just verb a noun: you always have to give a hint, usually choosing between -es- (being that thing), -iz- (supplying that thing) or -ag- (doing something with that thing or acting like that thing). While that sounds like an extra hassle, it gives Ido its superpower: returnebleso ("returnability"). It is a guarantee that if you learn what a derived form means, you can figure out what the root means.

Esperanto doesn't have that property because if you don't know whether the root is intrinsically a noun or a verb you won't know until you look into the dictionary. This example is what Idists love to taunt Esperantists with:

ĝoja - joyful

trista - sad

It looks simple enough but the look is deceptive. One of those roots is intrinsically a verb and the other is an adjective. This distinction is not visible because Esperanto doesn't have returnebleso. Noun those adjectives and now you'll see it:

ĝojo - joy

tristeco - sadness

In Ido this is impossible. There will always be a suffix that tells you what's going on:

joyoza - joyful

trista - sad

Once you know that "joyoza" is joyful, you can infer that "joyo" must be joy. That is returnebleso.

Why Ido doesn't work

Ido is built upon mostly Romance vocabulary, which has its own logic. For changing nouns to adjectives and back it actually works great, because the logic of Ido is precisely that of Romance languages. Namely, -o being the noun ending and -a being the adjective ending:

Xo is something that is Xa

Xa is something that is Xo

Simple as that. Effectively Ido has 2 root classes (noun/adjective and verb) and Esperanto has 3.

The main problem of Ido is that its relationship between verbs and nouns has no basis in the source languages whatsoever.

Let's try professions. For each root X- that means a profession there are two choices:

Xo is the worker and Xagar is to work

Xisto is the worker and Xar is to work

Can you guess how the following roots work?

soldat-

interpret-

pilot-

medik-

(Answers at the end of this page.)

Let's try instruments. For each root X- that means an instrument there are two choices:

Xo is the instrument and Xagar is to work with it

Xilo is the instrument and Xar is to work with it

Can you guess how the following roots work?

bros- (a broom, to sweep)

martel- (a hammer, to hammer)

klef- (a key, to use a key)

paf- (a firearm, to shoot a firearm)

(You know where the answers are.)

Last question! The root odor- means a smell, to smell. There are two choices:

odorar is to smell, odoruro is a smell

odorifar is to smell, odoro is a smell

...OK, that was a trick question. The dictionary gives odorar/odoro breaking all the rules.

Conclusion

I believe it would be better to have Ido-style relationship between nouns and adjectives, but keep Esperanto's freeform relationship between them and verbs. In the absense of a language that does that, I believe that Ido is very cute but not worth switching from Esperanto given how many more speakers Esperanto has.

Some points in response to this:

gemini://idiomdrottning.org/ido-vs-esperanto

Infinitives and imperatives

Ido. I don't know, maybe this is me being overly West-centric, but infs and imps just feels way more natural in Ido to me.

Wait a moment. Having 3 infinitives - past, present, and future - is natural to you? What natural language does that?

Adjective Agreement

Ido works but at the expense of all that is good and right!

I mean, there is elegance to the Ido way here. Elegant and minimalistic like a caveman!

It's an auxiliary language, not an artistic language like Quenya. It works, it's elegant, it's simple. What's more to desire?

Accusative

You only need it sometimes"—get on out of here! If you never needed it (not saying that would automatically work, I'm sure it's there for a reason), they might've won the round, but you still need it, it's just that you only need it some of the times. Worst of both worlds.

No, what Ido calls accusative just marks an object-before-subject word order. In English it would be rendered as "It is _ that _". If you never use this turn of phrase then you never use the accusative. It's actually great.

Answers

soldato, soldatagar

interpretisto, interpretar

pilotisto, pilotar

mediko, medikagar

brosilo, brosar

martelo, martelagar

klefo, klefagar

pafilo, pafar

2021-03-29 ~monerulo