Comparison between Esperanto and Ido

Calls for specific reforms to Esperanto were made almost from the beginning, and so Dr. L. L. Zamenhof published suggestions for reform in 1894. Publication took the form of a series of four articles (including a list of words singled out for possible change) in La Esperantisto monthly magazine, under the title Pri Reformoj en Esperanto. It was put to the vote whether this should be implemented in full or in part, or reworked or rejected. A big majority voted to reject it outright. It seems likely that, having learned Esperanto, speakers did not want to unlearn it. Because so many voted no Dr Zamenhof took no further interest in changing Esperanto and concentrated instead on the work of Fundamenta Esperanto.

It was a time of great interest in constructed languages and several people published artificial languages of their own creation. It was obviously desirable that one from among the constructed languages should be chosen as the international language. In 1900 Louis Couturat, a French mathematician, after initial correspondence with Dr L. L. Zamenhof created the Delegation for the Adoption of an International Auxiliary Language. The Delegation approached the International Association of Academies, based in Vienna, in 1907, requesting it to choose between the many artificial languages. This request was denied. The Delegation's response was to meet later that year (1907) in Paris as a committee under the chairmanship of Louis Couturat with the intention of deciding the issue themselves.

One of the languages under consideration was, of course, Esperanto. Zamenhof did not give permission to reprint his articles detailing his "Esperanto1894" suggestions but a reprint[2] was made and circulated, perhaps predisposing Committee members to think in terms of a reformed Esperanto. (There were 200 copies, distributed personally.). The Committee began its deliberations to choose an international auxiliary language from among the several entries. Most Esperantists assumed Esperanto would win easily. However, an anonymous entry was submitted at the last moment (against the rules) detailing a reformed version of Esperanto, which may have impressed the Committee. Louis Couturat as chairman demanded the Committee finalize its business within a month, and only five members were involved in making the final decision. Of the five, one abstained and four voted for Esperanto but said it must be reformed.

Many in the Esperanto movement felt betrayed. It later was discovered that the anonymous last-minute entrant was Louis de Beaufront, previously the chairman of the French Esperanto movement and chosen by Dr Zamenhof himself to present the case for Esperanto. People believed Louis Couturat had been well aware of what was going on. To this day there is much bewilderment in both the Esperanto and Ido communities about the rules and proceedings of the Committee.

Dr Zamenhof refused to be involved in making changes to Esperanto but a group led by Louis Couturat elaborated on Ido as a "Reformed Esperanto". There was much bitterness on both sides. Louis Couturat polemicised against Esperanto until his tragic early death in a car crash in 1914. His loss was a great setback to those who wished to spread Ido.

Not everyone involved in creating Ido was satisfied with it. Many former Idists, such as Otto Jespersen (who created Novial) left the movement, bleeding Ido of leaders.

Of all synthetic auxiliary languages, only Esperanto and Interlingua-IL de ApI gained a sizeable following and textual corpus to this day.

Esperanto is based on the Fundamento de Esperanto by L. L. Zamenhof; whereas the grammar of Ido is explained in the Kompleta Gramatiko Detaloza di la Linguo Internaciona Ido.

Ido omits two consonants used in Esperanto, /x/ and /d͡ʒ/, opting to use the similar sounds /h/ and /ʒ/ exclusively.[4]

Ido's rule for determining stress is regular, but more complex than Esperanto's. In Esperanto, all words are stressed on the second-to-last syllable: radio, televido. In Ido all polysyllables are stressed on the second-to-last syllable except for verb infinitives, which are stressed on the last syllable—skolo, kafeo and lernas for "school", "coffee" and the present tense of "to learn", but irar, savar and drinkar for "to go", "to know" and "to drink". If an i or u precedes another vowel, the pair is considered part of the same syllable when applying the accent rule—thus radio, familio and manuo for "radio", "family" and "hand", unless the two vowels are the only ones in the word, in which case the "i" or "u" is stressed: dio, frua for "day" and "early".[5]

Esperanto eliminates the letters ‹q›, ‹w›, ‹x›, and ‹y› from the 26-letter Latin alphabet and adds the new letters ‹ĉ›, ‹ĝ›, ‹ĥ›, ‹ĵ›, ‹ŝ› and ‹ŭ›. Ido uses the 26-letter alphabet without changes, substituting digraphs for Esperanto's diacritics. While words in both Ido and Esperanto are spelled exactly as they are pronounced, the presence of digraphs means that Ido does not have the one-to-one correspondence between letters and sounds that Esperanto has. However, Ido's digraphs are more recognizable to speakers of Romance languages and its avoidance of diacritics guarantees that any computer system that supports English could easily be used for Ido.

The Fundamento de Esperanto does allow the use of the digraphs ‹ch›, ‹gh›, ‹hh›, ‹jh›, ‹sh› and the single letter ‹u› instead of the ordinary diacritical letters of Esperanto when those are unavailable. With the advent of computers, another system of surrogate Esperanto writing using ‹cx›, ‹gx›, ‹hx›, ‹jx›, ‹sx› and ‹ux› was introduced. It however remains unofficial.

In general, the letter ĥ (the guttural sound) in Esperanto becomes h or k in Ido. The letters ĝ and ĵ are merged into j (which has the sound of "s" in "leisure") while ĉ, ŝ, ŭ, ks/kz, and kv respectively become ch, sh, w, x, and qu.

Both in Ido and in Esperanto, each word is built from a root word. A word consists 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.

Some of the grammatical endings of the two languages are defined as follows:

Most of these endings are the same as in Esperanto except for -i, -ir, -ar, -or and -ez. Esperanto marks noun plurals by an agglutinative ending -j (so plural nouns end in -oj), uses -i for verb infinitives (Esperanto infinitives are tenseless), and uses -u for the imperative. Verbs in both Esperanto and Ido do not conjugate depending on person, number or gender; the -as, -is, and -os endings suffice whether the subject is I, you, he, she, they, or anything else.

Both languages have the same grammatical rules concerning nouns (ending with -o), adjectives (ending with -a) and many other aspects. (However, the relationship between nouns, verbs and adjectives underwent a number of changes with Ido, based on the principle of reversibility.) In both languages one can see a direct relationship between the words multa "many" and multo "a multitude" by simply replacing the adjectival -a with a nominal -o, or the other way around.

Some minor differences include the loss of adjectival agreement, and the change of the plural from an agglutinative -j tacked onto the end to a synthetic replacement of the terminal -o with an -i. Hence, Esperanto belaj hundoj ("beautiful dogs") becomes Ido bela hundi. Ido also does away with the direct object ending -n in sentences where the subject precedes the object, so Esperanto mi amas la belajn hundojn ("I love the beautiful dogs") would in Ido become me amas la bela hundi.

Greater differences arise, however, with the derivations of many words. For example, in Esperanto, the noun krono means "a crown", and by replacing the nominal o with a verbal i one derives the verb kroni "to crown". However, if one were to begin with the verb kroni, "to crown", and replace the verbal i with a nominal o to create a noun, the resulting meaning would not be "a coronation", but rather the original "crown". This is because the root kron- is inherently a noun: With the nominal ending -o the word simply means the thing itself, whereas with the verbal -i it means an action performed with the thing. To get the name for the performance of the action, it is necessary to use the suffix -ado, which retains the verbal idea. Thus it is necessary to know which part of speech each Esperanto root belongs to.

Ido introduced a number of suffixes in an attempt to clarify the morphology of a given word, so that the part of speech of the root would not need to be memorized. In the case of the word krono "a crown", the suffix -izar "to cover with" is added to create the verb kronizar "to crown". From this verb it is possible to remove the verbal -ar and replace it with a nominal -o, creating the word kronizo "a coronation". By not allowing a noun to be used directly as a verb, as in Esperanto, Ido verbal roots can be recognized without the need to memorize them.

Ido corresponds more overtly to the expectations of the Romance languages, whereas Esperanto is more heavily influenced by Slavic semantics and phonology.

Ido word order is generally the same as Esperanto (subject–verb–object). The sentence Me havas la blua libro is the same as the Esperanto Mi havas la bluan libron ("I have the blue book"), both in meaning and word order. There are a few differences, however:

• In both Esperanto and Ido, adjectives can precede the noun as in English, or follow the noun as in Spanish. Thus, Me havas la libro blua means the same thing.
• Ido has the accusative suffix -n, but unlike Esperanto, this suffix is only required when the object of the sentence is not clear, for example, when the subject-verb-object word order is not followed. Thus, La blua libron me havas also means the same thing.

Unlike Esperanto, Ido does not impose rules of grammatical agreement between grammatical categories within a sentence. Adjectives don't have to be pluralized: in Ido the large books would be la granda libri as opposed to la grandaj libroj in Esperanto.

Although Esperanto and Ido share a large amount of vocabulary, there are differences. The creators of Ido felt that much of Esperanto was either not internationally recognizable, or unnecessarily deformed, and aimed to fix these with more "international" or "corrected" roots. This can sometimes be at the expense of Esperanto's simpler word building process.

Ido, unlike Esperanto, does not assume the male gender in roots such as for family. For example, Ido does not derive the word for waitress by adding a feminine suffix to waiter, as Esperanto does to derive it from neutral to only feminine. Instead, Ido words are defined as gender neutral, and two different suffixes derive masculine and feminine words from the root: servisto for a waiter of any gender, servistulo for a male waiter, and servistino for a waitress. There are only two exceptions to this rule:[6] First, patro for father, matro for mother, and genitoro for parent, and second, viro for man, muliero for woman, and adulto for adult.[7]

Below are some examples in first Esperanto then Ido with English, French, German, Italian, Spanish and Portuguese for linguistic comparison:*

*[Note that Spanish, Portuguese, and French are Romance languages, while German and English are Germanic languages. English has also had large influences from French and Latin. In comparison, Esperanto is somewhat more influenced by German vocabulary and Slavic semantics (as in the case of prefix mal-) and has more priority over word compounding by affixes.]

Esperanto and Ido were compared in studies at Columbia University circa 1933:

A question which has been of interest to us is the comparative ease of learning of various artificial languages. The above records are all for Esperanto. Unfortunately we have been able to test only two groups learning Ido. Our test material is available to anyone who wishes to obtain further results. Of our two groups one comprised only four volunteer college students. The other consisted of twenty-eight educated adults who studied Ido for twenty hours as paid subjects in an experiment. We present here the outcome of our study.

Before any study of Ido the initial test scores are higher [than Esperanto], but the gains are less except in one function—aural understanding.

The final scores are practically the same. They are the same in vocabulary, 71.9; in terms of the sum of the three other tests, we have final scores of 44.1 for Esperanto and 45.2 for Ido. These results are, it must be remembered, for a limited number of subjects of able intellect who were working under more or less favorable conditions. Further experimentation, however, will probably bear out our conclusion that there is no great difference in difficulty in the learning of these two particular synthetic languages.

— International Auxiliary Language Association, 1933[1]

Esperanto is estimated to have approximately 100,000 to 2 million fluent speakers.[11] In the same manner estimates for the number of Ido speakers are far from accurate, but 500 to a few thousand is most likely. It is also important to note the distinction between the number of speakers compared to the number of supporters; the two languages resemble each other enough that a few weeks of study will enable one to understand the other with little difficulty, and there are a number of people that have learned Ido out of curiosity but prefer to support the larger Esperanto movement and vice versa. The number of participants at the respective international conferences is also much different: Esperanto conferences average 2000 to 3000 participants every year whereas Ido conferences have around 10 participants each year. Each language also has a number of regional conferences during the year on a much less formal basis, and with smaller numbers.

The Lord's Prayer:

• Esperanto
• Esperanto1894
• Ido

The Wikibook Ido has a page on the topic of: How is Ido different from Esperanto?

• Fundamento de Esperanto.
• Kompleta Gramatiko Detaloza di la Linguo Internaciona Ido (Complete Detailed Grammar of the International Language Ido).
• Plena Manlibro de Esperanta Gramatiko (A Complete Handbook of Esperanto Grammar).
• Which IAL? A comparison of the two languages and others by a supporter of both and the IAL concept in general.
• Why Ido?
• Comparison at the Conlang Atlas of Language Structures
• Comparison of Esperanto and Ido based on basic vocabulary. EVOLAEMP project of the University of Tübingen.