Talk:Comparison between Esperanto and Ido

Note

Okay, this is the first bit of the article. Not sure if the url for the Fundamento is the best one so replace as you all see fit. 211.240.138.197 11:07, 22 September 2005 (UTC)

Finances

Anybody have any concrete numbers for the total amount of donations, purchases and whatnot for the Esperanto community? For Ido it's quite easy because it's almost nothing. There's the yearly conference plus some books and dictionaries that can be bought, and the rest is all available on-line for free. I always read about rich people from Hungary, Brazil and Japan pitching in for Esperanto though. Also how many people actually make a living just working for Espo? That would be interesting to add. Mithridates 11:14, 7 November 2005 (UTC)

optional affixes

Mithradates, if spozulo is optionally spozo, doesn't that destroy the morphological argument for Ido? How can the part of speech of the root be transparent if it can be used as either a noun or a verb without a suffix, like the Esperanto example of krono/kroni? Just curious. kwami 19:08, 11 November 2005 (UTC)

spozo by itself does just mean "spouse" but I don't think there are any derivations from that, except for awkward ones like spozigar which probably sounds about as good as "spousify" for marriage, which is just mariajar in Ido. Is that what you meant? The word spozo by itself just signifies a person one is married to, male or female, and the addition of -ul- makes it clear that we're referring to a man. Mithridates 06:23, 15 November 2005 (UTC)

Sorry, my bad. I'd forgotten -ulo was the masculin suffix. kwami 09:17, 15 November 2005 (UTC)

History section

I have started a history section, which at the moment seems very biased towards Esperanto, but this is not actually the case. I am trying to write a section which will present, not just a history of the two languages, but also a history of the two movements' relationship to one another. Honestly, I cannot find much reference material which isn't biased. The Esperantists feel betrayed by the evil Idists, and the Idists all seem to be martyrs of the cause of a better language. I know truth usually lies inbetween. I simply want to present how each side feels about the other. Perhaps there should be a seperate section on the movements' relationship? Thoughts anyway. And please feel free to add or edit. Jon 04:06, 30 November 2005 (UTC)

Stressed syllables

-- One change that Ido made is the stressed syllable of words. In Esperanto, it's easy and perfectly predictable where the stress is. In Ido, it's not as easy: usually it's on the penultimate syllable, but if the word ends with r it's on the last syllable, and the vowels i and u can function as semivowels in some cases (ex.: radio, defeating the purpose of dedicated semivowels y and w). I'm surprised this isn't mentioned in the article, but i'm not sure about the wording.--Yuu en 20:33, 17 December 2005 (UTC)

Would the stress rule be "last vowel before the last consonant"? kwami 23:21, 17 December 2005 (UTC)

-- It seemed a perfecte rule to me until i found this (under "stress", or search for "rendévuo"): http://donh.best.vwh.net/Languages/ido.html --Yuu en 04:51, 20 December 2005 (UTC)

Maybe whenever there's another vowel available, -CiV and -CuV are counted as one final syllable and so don't take stress? Omnadía might be an exception because it's a compound, and the word dia would have to be stressed on the i. Muzéo would be regular, because it's only the high vowels /i/ and /u/ that are spelled the same as the semivowels /j/ and /w/. (But egóismo doesn't seem to follow the compound idea.) kwami 06:42, 20 December 2005 (UTC)

-- OK, i found another reference: http://ido.narod.ru/linguo/kgd/acento-tonika.htm . It seems to be detailed and complete (talks about compounds and the exceptions for week days), but it's in Ido itself (i only know Esperanto), so i don't understand some parts. I must say that i love ( :-) ) regular spellings, and i see those rules as unnecessary complications for an international language (that was supposed to correct the problems of another!). I think the creators of Ido didn't like y and w much, since they use i and u as semivowels very ofen ;-) --Yuu en 18:34, 20 December 2005 (UTC)

Actually, it seems that in final -ia, -ua etc. the i and u are not semivowels, but separate vowels/syllables, and that the stress in such words is antepenultimate. Or, perhaps we could describe them as divocalic diphthongs (many languages do this: vowels retain their separate identities, but don't each constitute a separate syllable). The days of the week are not exceptions, since they're not compounds. (Espo also has many inherited compounds that aren't true compounds in Espo.)

Personally, I don't have a problem with moderately complex stress assignment. Because it's reinforced with every word you hear or say, it quickly becomes second nature. kwami 20:15, 20 December 2005 (UTC)

unasenceso

-- I think that an important point in Ido is its "unasenceso" (one-sensedness) principle. Every Ido root has one meaning, while some Esperanto roots actually have two close meanings: verbal and non-verbal. For instance, adolesko (a teenager) - adoleski (to grow up), aero (air) - aeri (to pump), aviado (aviation) - aviadi (to fly a plane). Some verb-noun pairs are modelled after English or other languages, e.g. akvo (water) - akvi (to water), almozo (alm) - almozi (to beg for alms) (and that's only a fraction of examples starting with A). Even more disturbing, some compound words are permitted to have a fixed meaning: lernejo (school) literally means only a place to learn. This is something that can never happen in Ido.

Do these these issues deserve mentioning on the page? And what do Esperantists think of them? Alih 12:53, 26 January 2006 (UTC)

I don't believe it. Those claims may be made, but they're not possible in human language. The only way Ido could maintain this level of perfect regularity would be if it were never spoken. As soon as you get a speaking community, people will start using words idiosyncratically. Granted, I don't know Ido, so perhaps it is the one exception to all other language, but I've heard that the forced regularity of Ido on the surface level only serves to push its irregularities in deeper, where they aren't noticed by the novice, but where in the end they cause the same difficulties as the irregularities of Espo. kwami 18:31, 26 January 2006 (UTC)

It doesn't matter if they are to be believed. The principle is notable as a argument of Ido proponents regardless of its merit. I must look into the "unasenceso" idea, but for now I will add mention to the article as per my current understanding. -- Naytz (talk) 21:22, 24 July 2015 (UTC)

"Adolesko" is a bad example. It doesn't mean "teenager". That's "adoleskanto". It's a verbal root, which does not mean "to grow up", but "to be an adolescent", so "adolesko" means "adolescence". 217.109.85.156 (talk) 09:31, 16 April 2019 (UTC)

Does this have to do with unasenceso? 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. (From this Wikipedia article in Morphology section) --Naytz (talk) 22:08, 24 July 2015 (UTC)

Memorizing the meaning of a root without memorizing if it's a noun or a verb? How does that work? What do you memorize? If you only memorize that "kron-" is something related to a crown, but can't remember if it's the noun "crown" or the verb "to crown", then you can't know if "krono" means "crown" or "coronation". 217.109.85.156 (talk) 09:31, 16 April 2019 (UTC)

Internationality

The chart makes it look like Ido is more international because its more Latin-like, whereas Eo has words from Germanic and Slavic languages, so it seems that Eo is more international to me.Cameron Nedland 22:44, 15 July 2006 (UTC)

Internationality isn't supposed to mean the number of languages that supply some token cognates, which doesn't buy a speaker of any of them much, but rather how widespread all the chosen cognates are. -- Dissident (Talk) 04:36, 13 September 2006 (UTC)

Well alrighty then.Cameron Nedland 20:07, 27 September 2006 (UTC)

Then Esperanto could be less International (yet to be probed, though, as still there is not a clear countable relationship between "simmilarity of words", "number of languages the auxiliary languague is simmilar to" and "how widespread each one of those languages is") but Esperanto is then undoubtely more neutral, as neutrality is supposed to mean, as in Esperanto article is mentioned: "a truly neutral language would draw its vocabulary from a much wider variety of languages, so as not to give unfair advantage to speakers of any of them". So please do not delete the statement about neutrality I wrote, I think that this comparing article is not neutral and claims the advantages of Ido without thinking of the advantages of Esperanto. --80.174.65.68 23:57, 4 April 2007 (UTC)

By the way, it is interesting how "internationality" is mentioned here as something more important than neutrality but in Ido and Interlingua compared article, internationality is not mentioned at all, but neutrality in the other hand is mentioned as the main difference! ...I wrote a sentence about neutrality here and got deleted because it was not a valid POV? I think that the general information here is far too much ido-ist. The constatable (just look at the dictionary) consideration I wrote about the number of roots in both languages (Esperanto vs Ido) got also deleted... Personally, if I wanted a neutral and schematical lenguage I'd go for Esperanto, and if I wanted an international language, I'd go for interlingua. Ido does not do that well for both ways, 80.174.65.68 00:43, 5 April 2007 (UTC)

That's nice, but the article should not be "Esperanto vs. Ido" but rather one that simply lists the differences between the two. Mithridates 02:39, 5 April 2007 (UTC)

Exactly. Then please explain why that "internationality" concept is a difference between the two languages, and neutrality and number of roots is not.

Also.. I don't see your point. You deleted my sentence about neutrality by saying "That's still debatable. Ido is more international." Did my sentence say that it wasn't? this is not an Ido vs. Esperanto fight, I'm not Esperantist but I think this article does not take all the facts into consideration. Also a higher number of roots, being them also romance-like makes it less neutral, that's one of the reasons it is an important fact. --80.174.65.68 13:34, 5 April 2007 (UTC)

I didn't say Ido was more international. I said some might make that argument, and both would be equally POV. Mithridates 13:41, 5 April 2007 (UTC)

.The entire "Internationality" section would be a POV then. If that section is kept, and since "internationality" and "neutrality" are antagonical concepts in the way this article understands it, I don't see why there is no place for the explanation about this duality. 80.174.65.68 14:05, 5 April 2007 (UTC)

Yeah, the word internationality just invites POV. Since that section has to do with vocabulary as well, we can just remove the 'internationality' title. I agree that these "IAL x and IAL b compared" articles are all pretty bad. I don't even think they're necessary. Mithridates 14:12, 5 April 2007 (UTC)

Okay, I reworded it and removed 'internationality' as a section. How's it look now? Mithridates 14:14, 5 April 2007 (UTC)

That's better, thanks. I'd also change the "more "international" or "corrected" roots" sentence into "more "romancish"" or something like that...hmm.. I'm not english speaker, don't know if there is a more precise word... 80.174.65.68 14:23, 5 April 2007 (UTC)

I think the word international there is okay because it's in quotes and preceded by "the creators of Ido felt" - the creators did say that they were making a more "international" language, so as a quote it's accurate. Without the quotes or the statement that it was simply their view it would be a POV statement, yes. Mithridates 14:45, 5 April 2007 (UTC)

Chart

Somone made the chart where you can't read the Ido and Esperanto. I don't know how to fix it.Cameron Nedland 13:15, 28 September 2006 (UTC)

Vocabulary

In vocabulary it says: "However, Ido lacks the one-to-one correspondence between letters and phonemes that Esperanto has, using the three digraphs qu, sh and ch. One-to-one correspondence has been adopted in Esperanto to ease pronunciation learning and parsability of the written text."

But Esperanto does have digraphs. oj, aj, aux, etc. It even says there are digraphs on the Esperanto wiki page. --98.203.152.242 (talk) 05:52, 14 December 2009 (UTC)

Esperanto has no digraphs (multiple letters corresponds to one sound), but has diphtongs like oj, aj (multiple sounds are somewhat merged into one sequence when pronounced, but they still consist from multiple sounds). —Preceding unsigned comment added by 91.185.63.157 (talk) 15:07, 19 December 2009 (UTC)

The definition of a digraph is "a pair of letters, especially a pair representing a single phoneme," which is exactly what oj, aj, aux, etc. are, but they are also diphthongs. Therefore Esperanto doesn't have one-to-one character correspondence as there are multiple digraphs which are also diphthongs.

--98.203.152.242 (talk) 09:55, 14 February 2010 (UTC)

Actually Esperanto has one-to-one character-to-phoneme (not sound) correspondence, since Esperanto phonology considers that "diphtongs" as vowel+semivowel segments, while phonetically they trend to be pronounced as single unit (but actually there is no strict rule on it - it's up to the reader how to pronounce such segments). 91.185.63.25 (talk) 01:26, 7 April 2010 (UTC)

Representations of orthography

Linguists use angle brackets when exhibiting orthography, as in <ĉ> stands for [tʃ]. I am changing all of the quotation marks around individual letters that are currently in the article. --N-k (talk) 22:29, 27 March 2010 (UTC)

When I saw <unnecessary< I thought there must be a PLATO veteran about: on PLATO keyboards, double-quote is shift-comma. —Tamfang (talk) 20:15, 30 July 2010 (UTC)

In at least some articles ‹› is preferred to <>. —Tamfang (talk) 19:50, 16 August 2011 (UTC)

Or ⟨⟩ (Unicode 27E8,27E9). —Tamfang (talk) 05:00, 29 July 2013 (UTC)

I also just realized that there is currently no orthography section. Since Esperanto's diacritics are a favorite object of criticism among Idists, there probably should be one. --N-k (talk) 22:31, 27 March 2010 (UTC)

Comparison bias

It's important to add Latin language in the comparison. I feel that the claim that Esperanto deformed the root of words, such as bubalo "buffalo" is biased. In fact, the origin is Latin and it's bubalus. That's the least deformed of the rest of the languages:

bufalo buffalo buffle Büffel bufalo búfalo búfalo

We already use Latin in taxonomy, so the Esperanto word for it is the closest to Latin, making it more memorized and more practical. --Mahmudmasri (talk) 18:00, 26 July 2011 (UTC)

One may wonder why ĉevalo ('horse') rather than kabalo or kavalo. —Tamfang (talk) 19:47, 16 August 2011 (UTC)

Yes, indeed, however, the word kabalo is already used for kabbalah and Kavalo is also used for some place in Greece (Kavala), so the Esperanto word for "horse" is obviously borrowed from French, "cheval". It could be "kabaluso" (from Latin, "caballus"), the same way the problem with (horo, koro, ĥoro) was solved by using koruso. --Mahmudmasri (talk) 06:03, 8 November 2011 (UTC)

word order

Ido word order is generally the same as Esperanto (subject–verb–object). ... There are a few differences, however:

• 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.

That's not a difference! Eĉ guto malgranda, konstante frapante, traboras la monton granitan. —Tamfang (talk) 18:34, 4 July 2012 (UTC)

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Esperanto1894

There is a new site about Esperanto1894 live online by now: https://sites.google.com/site/esperanto1894/

It suddenly strikes me that the year of this reformation of the artificial language, 1894, might have of influence to Orwell's 1984 next to the publication date of his work (1948)... otherwise it's a nice coincidence or an intertextuality by pure chance Jansegers (talk) 16:14, 27 August 2017 (UTC)

Accusative marking being optional

The chart explains that Ido requires accusative only if the object precedes the subject, but the examples given for Ido contrast in whether the object precedes the verb, not the subject. If the explanation is correct then it should be valid Ido to say me lakto drinkas while the mandatory accusative would occur in lakton me drinkas. KVenzke (talk) 22:55, 22 April 2021 (UTC)

Gender

Is Esperanto masculine by default or gender-neutral by default? The overview table originally described it as masculine by default, but an IP has changed it to gender-neutral, stating it to be well-sourced. They gave an explanation on my talk page and it seems convincing to me, but since the overview is supposed to be a summary of the whole article and the information wasn't added to the main sections, I still feel this inclusion is somewhat wrong. I would like to see other opinions. - Munmula (talk · contribs) 06:37, 15 October 2022 (UTC)

The question is somewhat open to debate, and it depends to an extent on the speaker and context.

Traditionally, there was no way of referring to a lawyer (for example) without referring to their gender. An advokato was explicitly a male lawyer and a advokatino was explicitly a female lawyer. The most gender inclusive way of including both was advokato aŭ advokatino.

The same applied to all professions, all people, all animals. If your neighbour's cat was male, it was kato, if it was female it was katino, and if you didn't know you had to guess. In practice, everyone and everything was presumed male (the unmarked case), and being female was a notable deviation from the norm. This was the situation when Ido split, and was one of the points Ido explicitly wanted to improve.

Over time, such blatant sexism became less acceptable. Esperantists started adopting the male term as the generic term, so that a female lawyer could be an advokato. But the problem with this is that there is therefore no marked male case. If you want to say a specifically male cat, there are ad hoc ways of doing that (e.g. virkato i.e. man-cat, or katiĉo) but they aren't universally accepted.

Also, the fix is not universal. A frato is still a brother, not a sibling. A patro is a father, not a parent. There is now no systematic way of knowing whether an unmarked noun is intended to be male-only or generic as it depends on the word and on how conservative the speaker's dialect is. Kahastok talk 09:20, 15 October 2022 (UTC)

Reasonable analysis. The recent attempt to make Esperanto gender-neutral seems like a clumsy workaround, as the language was not originally intended to be so. Perhaps we should include both descriptions in the overview table, mentioning that the question is debatable or something? - Munmula (talk · contribs) 16:14, 15 October 2022 (UTC)

No. As described by other articles and grammar references (even here on Wikipedia), virtually all words are now (lexically) gender-neutral, with some exceptions (the exceptions being either remnants of the past masculine default, due to interference from other languages like frato, or because some words describe inherently male/female/third-gender entities like eŭnuko, a eunuch, or damo, a lady). They can gain a masculine/third-gender reading when contrasted with a female word, as in amiko kaj amikino (implying that the amiko is male, or at least not female). This situation is not stable, and part of a process which can lead to multiple outcomes. One example for this instability is the internal tension between, e.g. amikoj and geamikoj (both forms are now read as gender-neutral, leading some to suggest that the ge- prefix might become obsolete in the future). I might also add that "gender-neutrality by default with exceptions" is the rule that is taught in the Duolingo Esperanto course. See also Gender reform in Esperanto. TucanHolmes (talk) 11:56, 24 October 2022 (UTC)

Remove 'utrum' and replace with 'common gender'

I was confused about what 'utrum' meant and why is was used 11 times throughout the article, so I searched it up. It's an obscure term that derives from Swedish utrum that refers to common gender (i.e., masculine and feminine genders, but not neuter gender). The Wikipedia page merely redirects to the Swedish grammar page, and Wiktionary is sparse.

The article itself cites no one that directly uses 'utrum' to refer to common gender, leading me to believe it was a Swedish editor that didn't know the English equivalent.

Kosinvita (talk) 21:53, 26 July 2023 (UTC)

You're most likely right. It really doesn't seem like a real linguistic term in English. - Munmula (talk · contribs) 08:59, 1 August 2023 (UTC)

I've just looked it up and it seems that in Latin uter/utrum means "either", while neuter/neutrum means "none". Since this makes them opposites, the use of 'utrum' would be to emphasize this difference (i.e., that 'common' is not the same as 'neuter', but rather its opposite). Anyway, a replacement by 'common' seems reasonable. - Munmula (talk · contribs) 09:07, 1 August 2023 (UTC)

emphasis

Ĉu manuo estas E-a vorto?? —Tamfang (talk) 05:18, 5 February 2024 (UTC)

Lau PIV, jes, ĝi estas religia vorto. Kvankam mi ne scias, ĉu tio estas dezirata, au simple eraro.

transl. Yes, according to the Plena Ilustrita Vortaro de Esperanto [an Esperanto dictionary], it is a religious term. Although I do not know whether this is intentional or simply an error. TucanHolmes (talk) 18:27, 5 February 2024 (UTC)