thank you to thelabyrinthmaker, Robert Nielsen, Luiz Borges Gomide, Vikram Sundarraman, Jordan
Stein, FishyCuber, and probably others for requesting this episode.
welcome to Conlang Critic, the show that gets facts wrong about YOUR favorite conlang!
I’m jan Misali, and in this episode, we’ll be looking at Esperantwo: Ido. you know what,
let’s just jump right into it this time! check it out: Ido is an IAL that was created
in 1907 by the Delegation for the Adoption of an International Auxiliary Language.
it was based on another language called Esperanto, which I’m just going to assume you already
know about.
if you don’t know what Esperanto is, please tell me how you found this video and why you’re
watching it! that information will be very useful for my marketing department.
anyway, Ido was designed to be “Esperanto but good”.
fortunately for my purposes, I very recently compiled a list of problems I have with Esperanto,
so it shouldn’t be that hard to see whether or not Ido succ eeds. Ido's consonants are:
this inventory is Esperanto but without /x/
or /dʒ/ and the rhotic is a flap instead of a trill, which is two steps forward and
one step back.
like, it’s cool how two of the least common distinctions are gone, but the distinctions
between /ts/ and /tʃ/ and between /z/ and /ʒ/ are still there.
also, cross linguistically, the alveolar trill is slightly more common than the alveolar
tap, so that change was completely unneeded.
Ido’s vowels are:
I am out of things to say about the five vowel system.
I’ve said all of them and now there’s just gonna be this short segment pretty much
every time I talk about an interlang where I point out that I don’t have anything to
say about the five vowel system.
maybe I should come up with like a catchphrase for this segment or something?
“hey everyone, it’s our old friend, the five vowel system!” no, that’s dumb.
whatever, I still have time to workshop it.
anyway, diphthongs!
what are you even doing, Ido?
I mean, cutting down Esperanto’s diphthongs makes sense and all, but why drop /ai̯/ and
keep /eu̯/?
/eu̯/ isn’t super common, but nearly every language with diphthongs has /ai̯/!
so in the last episode I went through the twenty six most commonly spoken languages
and pointed out that all of them are at least somewhat incompatible with Esperanto.
I did make a few mistakes here and there, like how I said Hindi and Urdu don’t have
/tʃ/. so, oops! they don’t have /ts/ though so my point still stands.
anyway, the most common language that’s compatible with Ido’s phonology is Italian,
which is the eighteenth most commonly spoken language.
that’s an improvement over Esperanto, but it’s still pretty bad.
if Ido didn’t have /eu̯/, then it would be compatible with German, the seventeenth
most commonly spoken language, and if it also didn’t have /ts/, it would be compatible
with English, the second most commonly spoken language.
Ido’s orthography isn’t great.
it’s a lot like Esperanto’s orthography, except there aren’t any diacritical marks
and there’s digraphs.
the sounds that ĝ and ĥ represent in Esperanto were removed, so they were dropped entirely,
ĉ became ch, ŝ became sh, ŭ became w because obviously, ĵ became just j, and j became
y. and it would’ve been fine and dandy if Ido had stopped there.
I would’ve complained about the use of digraphs for a couple of seconds and then moved on.
yet, for some reason, Ido decided to add the letters q and x.
I mean, I get why.
it’s so that words from Romance languages can still be spelled the same way.
it’s naturalistic, but sometimes all naturalism does is make things more difficult.
everything I said is bad about Esperanto’s grammar is absent from Ido. the accusative
case is indicated through word order (but it can be marked if you want to) and adjectives
don’t need to agree with the nouns they modify.
that’s all I have to say about it really.
everything else I could say also applies to Esperanto, like how the definite article doesn’t
really need to exist, or how the prepositions are somewhat confusing.
the vocabulary is a marginal improvement over Esperanto, but most of the changes don’t
really accomplish anything.
it’s still extremely Eurocentric, arguably even moreso, and country names are just as
likely to differ from their native form.
the prefix mal- is gone, which on one hand is less confusing to speakers of Romance languages,
but on the other hand makes learning the vocabulary take slightly more time.
the reasons Ido’s vocabulary is a net gain are twofold.
firstly, there’s actually some restrictions to what sequences of sounds are allowed.
like, scii is replaced with savar.
secondly, the sexism is gone!
I’ll explain how in a little bit, but first, we need to clear something up, because every
time I post a video where I mention sexism, I get the same comments over and over.
“leave your politics out of this and just rate the language!” well, I “vore” y うざき,
hear me out.
the way Esperanto handles gender works as though women are a type of man.
this is a naturalistic thing to do, but that’s because natural languages are the products
of the cultures they come from, and cultures tend to not stop being sexist until a while
after they’ve already figured out a way to speak.
however, with a constructed language, you can avoid this from the get go, and carefully
design a system where talking about women works the same as talking about men.
this is what Ido does.
most words for people have no gender associated with them, and there’s a pair of optional
suffixes to specify either of the binary genders, which happen to be the same as the gendered pronouns.
speaking of pronouns, Ido also has a gender neutral third person pronoun, which can be
used in any of the myriad of situations where you may wanna talk about someone without assigning
them a binary gender, so that’s cool.
but then, there’s also a formal / intimate distinction?
like, the singular second person pronoun is different depending on how well you know the
person you’re talking to.
that’s… kinda unintuitive!
I know, I’m an English speaker, so it probably sounds like I’m just complaining about something
my native language doesn’t do being confusing, but hey, guess what! my idiolect of written
English does in fact have a formal / intimate distinction, so yeah I’m being totally unbiased here!
all in all, I think that Ido introduces almost as many problems as it fixes, resulting in
a language that’s nearly as flawed as Esperanto, just in a different set of ways.
regardless, I’d say that I like Ido a little bit more than I like Esperanto, but not as
much as I like Toki Pona, making it the second best interlang reviewed so far.
thanks for watching, and I’ll see you next time, where I’ll be reviewing Volapük.