Ido: The Best Language You’ve Never Heard Of

HISTORY

You may have heard of Esperanto – the most widely-spoken constructed language of all time, with more than a million speakers today. 

A constructed language, or conlang, is one created intentionally by humans. All other languages are “natural”; they have developed from shared usage over the course of thousands of years. 

Natural languages are famously quite complex things. Aside from each having its own unique grammatical structure, and an accompanying long list of vocabulary that requires rote memorization, they also tend to be filled with exceptions and irregularities and special rules that means learning even a single natural language can easily be a lifelong educational process for any given person. 

In 1887 – almost 140 years ago – Dr. Zamenhof envisioned a conlang called Esperanto, its name meaning the language of hope. Zamenhof wanted to give humanity an option for intercommunication among disparate peoples that would be easier and more efficient to learn than any other natural language that existed. He hoped that such a bridge could help facilitate mutual understanding and, therefore, foster peace around the world.

He wasn’t the first to make the attempt. At the time there were many such projects: Volapük, Idiom Neutral, Latino Sine Flexione, and others. Eventually in 1901 a “Delegation for the Adoption of an International Auxiliary Language” was formed in Europe, with the intention of examining all the contenders and choosing the very best one. But in 1907 a Committee appointed by that Delegation came to a rather surprising conclusion:

It found that Esperanto was the best of all the languages that were submitted, but that it was still imperfect for the task. Indeed, Dr. Zamenhof had himself submitted changes to his own language about a decade earlier based on complaints he had received, but at that time there was already a large community of Esperanto speakers, and they rejected the changes. 

Triggering a controversy of betrayal and subterfuge, a proposal was submitted, at first in secret, for a set of changes to modify Esperanto called Ido (short for “Esperantido”, which means an “offspring of Esperanto”). The perceived abuse of authority by the Committee and the Delegation caused a backlash across the community, which was cemented when Dr. Zamenhof eventually distanced himself from the Delegation, the Committee, and their proposed Ido. 

And this is too bad, since Ido, as I’m about to show you, is far and away the best project ever devised for use as an International Auxiliary Language. Its only major fault (as we might ascribe to it today) is that it is entirely based on European languages, so that speakers of many other world languages (African, Asian, Oceanic, Inuit, and so on) are not offered the same introductory ease of learning which people from a European language background will enjoy. 

Even still, I am unaware of a better attempt made anywhere else on Earth (though Toki Pona is making an effort.)

THE BASICS

Learning a natural language will take an average person any number of months to become basically conversant, including regular study and practice. It might be as fast as three months with full immersion. The same amount of Ido can be learned in weeks, and you don’t need a specialized class or even a teacher to help impart the knowledge; you can learn it on your own. 

This is because Ido has been thoughtfully boiled down into just its barest component parts. Once you learn a rule or a word, that rule and word never changes. There are no exceptions, no irregularities. As soon as you learn something, you’ve learned it, and you can move on to the next thing. In the study of natural languages, this is like cheating. 

Ido doesn’t use indefinite articles (a, an), and its only definite article (the) is “la”. La never changes like in Spanish (el, la, las, los) or in German (der, die, das, den, etc.); it is always just la. 

The present tense verbal indicator is -as: 

The past tense is -is: 

Me lektis (I read, I did read), 
Vu manjis (you ate), 
Lu dormis (he/she/it slept).

And the future tense is -os:

Me lektos (I will read), 
Vu manjos (you will eat), 
Lu dormos (he/she/it will sleep).

In the above examples you can see that pronouns are used to give agency to verbal actions; the verb form doesn’t change.

Ido uses Subject-Verb-Object word order (as most natural languages do also), so you can tell who is doing what to whom:

Ni manjis la fisho. (We ate the fish.)
La fisho manjos ni. (The fish will eat us.) 

You can identify nouns because they will end with the letter -o (plural nouns end with -i). Similarly, adjectives end with -a and adverbs end with -e. 

La reda plumo skribas bone. (The red pen writes well.)
La bona plumi skribas rede. (The good pens write red.) 

In general you can exchange these endings to alter the notion of any root (also known as a “radical”), using it as a noun (-o, plural -i), a verb (-as, -is, -os), or modifying another noun (-a) or verb (-e), however you like – all you have to do is apply the appropriate ending letter(s). 

Doloro = a pain
Dolori = multiple pains
Doloras = hurts, is hurting
Dolora = painful
Dolore = painfully

Using the information I have outlined about, you can be speaking basic Ido in as much time as it takes you to learn the additional vocabulary for what you want to say. (And if you already speak a European language, then a lot of those words are going to look very familiar.) 

Case in point: I only discovered Ido existed about four months ago. And now here I am writing this article about it!

IDO VERSUS ESPERANTO

Esperanto came first, it’s not much more difficult to learn than Ido, and – even more persuasively – it already has the most speakers of any conlang ever invented. Why, then, should we consider Ido? 

Because it’s better. 

When devising a conlang for the lofty and noble purpose of serving as an International Auxiliary Language, even the smallest difficulty, merest inconvenience, or tiniest inefficiency which might only be barely noticed in isolation, resounds deafeningly in the presence of a superior answer to the problem. 

#1: Diacritics Were a Bad Choice

Esperanto makes use of diacritics – special characters added to some of its letters to indicate different sounds. Esperanto has letters c, g, h, j, s, and u, but also letters ĉ, ĝ, ĥ, ĵ, ŝ, and ŭ. (Note that while most of these diacritical marks are circumflexes, one of them is a breve, so you’ve even got two separate kinds of diacritical marks in use!) These characters are not easily produced on most keyboards.

Some languages make use of diacritics, but not all of them – and when they do, they often use different marks to mean different things (or worse, they can use the same marks to mean different things…). In any case, there are already enough letters kicking around in the Latin alphabet so as to make the use of diacritical marks at all unnecessary. 

#2: Ido is Easier to Learn

One of Dr. Zamenhof’s more inspired contributions within Esperanto is its Table of Correlatives – a valiant effort to synthesize and simplify a set of some of the most basic words which languages rely on to pose and answer questions (who, what, when, where, why, and so on). 

He has sensibly and rationally laid out the various question types along one axis of a graph, and along the other, he has arrayed all the possible forms each question can take (within Esperanto). For each entry, then, Dr. Zamenhof has assigned a phonological value (that is, a sound or group of sounds), so that whenever a speaker would like to ask a question, they can identify the type of question they wish to ask on one side of the graph, and connect it to the particular form of that question along the other side, and by combining the two separate phonemic values, they will logically arrive at the correct word for the circumstance. 

Here’s an excerpt: 

	ki- = Question	i- = Indefinite	neni- = Negation
Place = -e	kie = where	ie = somewhere	nenie = nowhere
Amount = -om	kiom = how much	iom = some, a bit	neniom = none
Reason = -al	kial = why	ial = for some reason	nenial = for no reason

This all seems pretty tidy and efficient, doesn’t it? It’s clever, rational, and precise. But even here Ido shows us the problem: this Table of Correlatives, however functional and well-designed, nevertheless bears no relation to any other natural language in the world; instead it was made from whole cloth, built entirely from scratch. That means that every student who wishes to learn to use it will be faced with the thankless and difficult task of memorizing the entire table (of 50 correlatives) by rote. In other words, it will be equally difficult for everyone to learn, regardless of language background.

Instead of conjuring something entirely new, Ido, on the other hand, simply makes use of already-existing words and adopts them, as both Ido and Esperanto do for the rest of their vocabularies anyway. 

English	Ido	Esperanto
what	quo	kio
why	por quo	kial
how much	quanta	kiom

This grants an incredible degree of ease of learning for anyone coming from a Romance language background, and even from other languages, such as English, which see cognates in words like “quotient” and “quantity”. 

It is important to bear in mind that just because a system is logical, that does not make it easy to use, or, indeed, even useful. 

#3: Comprehensibility & Euphony

The above example conveniently segues into our next complaint: that of comprehensibility and euphony. How easy is a language to speak, to hear, and to understand? Given how Esperanto marks plurals (-j) and the objective case (-n), words can get piled up with similar sounds. 

Here’s a quote from Wikipedia which nicely illustrates the point:

English	Take all those, which you want, and leave all those, which you don’t like.
Ido	Prenez ti omna, quin vu volos, e lasez ti omna, qui ne plezos a vu.
Esperanto	Prenu ĉiujn tiujn, kiujn vi volos, kaj lasu ĉiujn tiujn, kiuj ne plaĉos al vi.

And yes! You are seeing the letter i, pronounced like [i], as well as the letter j, pronounced like [y]. Having fun yet?!

#4: Gender

Esperanto not only lacks a proper genderless human pronoun, but it also problematically assumes the male gender by default in many of its words. If you need to specify a word as female, there is a special affix you can attach to it. But what if you’d like to avoid mentioning gender altogether?

Within the changes proposed by Ido (in 1907, mind you!), this has been addressed. Ido has a pronoun that means “he or she”, or even “genderless entity” (lu), and all Ido words are understood to have zero gender information by default (with exceptions for a few words which inherently suggest a particular gender, like patro, “father”, and matro, “mother”). 

If you want to specify gender, there are affixes to use: -ulo for male and -ino for female. So a policisto is a “police officer” and a servisto is a “server”, but a policistulo is a male police officer, and a servistino is a female server, or waitress.

Another example is sioro, which means “sir”, “madam”, “mister”, “lady”, “gentleman”, or even “miss”; it is a respectful term of address for anyone and everyone, regardless of gender. If it’s important to specify, you can use siorulo to specify a male or siorino to make it female, but sioro alone is usually sufficient.  

Especially now, in today’s climate of inclusion and political correctness, this seems a screamingly obvious quality you would want your International Auxiliary Language to have. Evidently it was obvious enough for a handful of language nerds more than a 100 years ago! 

There are more changes Ido made to improve upon Esperanto, and if you’re interested you can read more about those here, but I have outlined the biggest ones. 

Conclusion

Given that Esperanto is already a fairly unknown language project, it is not surprising that Ido is even more unknown. Though it is unfortunate, given the profound utility it offers the world.

But even if no one else spoke Ido, I would still study it for its own sake. Its unmatched simplicity, coupled with its incredible capacity for meaning, expression, and precision, means that studying Ido is like reading poetry. As a language, it’s beautiful. I have found learning Ido to be a satisfying and pleasing experience in and of itself, and not merely a tedious one, as many language-learning attempts prove to be.

One can’t help but conclude that the members of the Delegation and the Committee (of over a hundred years ago!) had taken the project of an International Auxiliary Language seriously, and by and large knew what they were doing (at least linguistically). And I posit that the fruit of their labor, Ido, is a superior iteration of Esperanto, and is the ultimate form of an International Auxiliary Language, such as we have today.

Danko pro lektas mea artiklo! Me esperas ke vu lernis kelko nova.

More Information

Quite a lot of material can be found here, however the best singular resource I’ve found for learning Ido, if you’re coming from English, is the book, “Ido for All”, which can be downloaded for free at the link. To have a physical copy printed, follow the steps listed here.

My favorite online dictionary for Ido is Glosbe.