Ido and I...

When I first heard about the Esperanto language, I thought it was a brilliant idea. For the unacquainted, Esperanto is an artificial language, created by L L Zamenhof at the end of the 19th Century. It was intended to be learnt as a second language by people of different cultures, countries and native languages, and to promote equal and clear communication between them. Compared to national languages, Esperanto it should be very easy to learn. (A language that is intended for this role is known as an "International Auxiliary Language" or IAL).

However, when I first tried to learn Esperanto, the experience was not all rosy... To be sure, it is significantly easier than any national language I've tried to learn (and I've tried to learn quite a few!). But there were some features of the language which seemed less than ideal, and some that I found seemed ugly or counterintuitive. To give a few examples:

• The writing system uses several characters that don't exist in other languages, and while it is possible to produce them on computers, it is an unnecessary headache.



• Several common words (such as kvin "five") start with difficult to pronounce consonant clusters like "kv". (Possibly due to the fact that Zamenhof was a native Polish speaker).



• The male version of a word and the gender-free version of a word are the same, with the female word derived from this. In practical terms, this can make it difficult to distinguish the male and the gender-free versions. For example, nepo can mean "grandson" or "grandchild". If you want to specifically specify "male and/or" female, you have to use the prefix ge-.



• According to the rules of Esperanto, names of people and places have to be changed to end with an o when they are used in the name Esperanto. One of the worst examples of this is that the names "Marie" or "Maria" have to be rendered as Mario.



• The lack of a familiar form of the word "you" (e.g. English "thou", Spanish/French/Italian/Romanian "tu", German "du"). This means losing a degree of information when translating from these languages that can be important in understanding the subtext of conversation or prose.



• The compulsory use of an accusative case marker (-n at the end of object nouns). I've had enough trouble getting my head around the accusative in German and Romanian, without having to deal with it in a "simplified" language as well.

Having noticed this kind of feature I considered that someone should go about revising the Esperanto language to address these issues. Shortly afterwards, I learnt about a language called Ido, a reformed version of Esperanto created at the beginning of the 20th century by a small group of linguists and scientists. The reforms included in Ido addressed the very difficulites I'd had in addressing Esperanto. I've since looked into other constructed languages - and even tried creating a couple of my own. I'm now convinced that Ido is probably the best existing option for an international auxiliary language. If we were seeking an IAL to just be used within Europe, then Ido is certainly the best existing option.

So is Ido the perfect IAL? Actually, I don't think a "perfect" IAL is possible. The target audience is everyone, and people come from such a wide range of native languages and cultures that what may be perfect for one group is unlikely to be to another. So, there are some features of Ido that groups of people will still take issue with (and other groups will take issue with completely different features). However, it is unhelpful to continuously revise a language - this would make it impossible to build up a base of speakers. There comes a point where you have to say that a language is good enough for the purpose, and start to promote it. In my opinion, Esperanto is not quite at this point. Ido, on the other hand is.