Ido vs Esperanto

I never gave Ido a chance but today I heard it was very similar to Esperanto. I didn’t realize the languages were so similar. If it can be a better language that’s also a stepping stone to basically also picking up Esperanto vocab at the same time, that could be a cool thing.

I’ve obviously always liked Lojban more than Esperanto, and so never got very far into the latter, but Esperanto’s huge population is undeniably appealing.

Point by point

Going through Wikipedia’s comparison between the languages:

Alphabet

Esperanto. Beautifuller, cooler, eleganter. One sound per one glyph. In the ASCII 90s I would’ve said Ido. The gx, hx thing was a bad time.

Gender

Ido. Esperanto has always been frankly dumb about this. Riismo is great (esp since “ri” is familiar to Lojban peeps) but doesn’t solve the basic noun issue.

Antonyms

Ido. I love this. Esperantos mal-everything is a way bigger problem than the gender stuff.

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. OTOH, the strangeness of Esperanto’s forms is part of its charm so even though points go to Ido here, I’m not sure just how big those points should be.

Plural noun

Esperanto wins this one. Again, I don’t care a whole lot. It’s like a percent of a percent nicer to have agglutivative plurals. Synthetic, like Ido, is perfectly fine.

Adjective agreement

Esperanto!

Whiskey Tango Foxtrot, Ido, what are you doing?! “Granda hundi!” Are you serious! “Big dogs”, what is this, English? I guess as a concession to anglophones, 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! What, you use a pencil in space so you can’t be bothered to decline your adjectives?

Accusative

Esperanto.

I get that having an accusative case is a huge ask on learners who aren’t used to it, but, Ido’s solution is a non-solution. “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.

Proper nouns

I’d have liked to give this point to Esperanto because rendering proper nouns is something I kinda love. Everything becomes a deeper part of the language. However, the example of Eǔropo was a shot straight to Esperanto’s foot. It reminds me that everything is a dude in Esperanto. Making Eǔropo a dude: minus a thousand points.

Summary

Ido

3 points.

Esperanto

Negative 996 points.

Conclusion

Knowing that there’s just a few changes between a good language with a small population and a bad language with huge population means that learning the shared subset of the two languages, and then the few differences, can feel more meaningful than just trying to learn the overly small language on its own or the overly bad language on its own.

I wish I had known about Ido growing up. We were obviously taught about Esperanto in middle school but they never said Ido was so close to Esperanto.

Looking more at it now, they are maybe less similar than I just now was hyping myself into believing. There are a lot of vocab changes beyond just the antonym thing, and, reading some Ido text the lack of accusative and the lack of the declined adjectives is really hard to get used to (uh, as is anything, when I’m just three seconds in, I guess).

Esperanto’s more slavic vocab is a huge selling point. I don’t need a language that’s similar to French and English because I can already read French and English (I mean, I’m not great at them but I scrape by). Esperanto’s huge Eastern European userbase is why it’s so appealing. This was a language that was in actual use for a long time and maybe still is. People would travel around Europe on just Esperanto alone.

Obviously the reason we’re looking into this stuff right now is Brexit. If we God-Damned Europeans don’t have to deal with Beautiful England anymore, it doesn’t make a whole lot of sense that we’re still using their language.

Looks like pretty much all the vocab is different, from nouns to verbs to conjunctions to pronouns. So this entire page’s point is completely voided! It’s basically two different languages, and, although Ido is better than Esperanto by some thousand points or so, there are many conlangs of Ido’s pop size that then would be in the running for best auxlang proposal. Even Lojban, although, uh, .imina junri lodu'u stidi.