A while back, my erstwhile roommate Dave and I learned Esperanto, a constructed language. I did it largely because I felt vaguely embarrassed that I only knew English, and it appealed to my engineering side to see such a well-formed and consistent grammar set.
Unfortunately, I become somewhat disenchanted, though of course not for such an obvious and pedestrian complaint of impracticality. Rather, there were some annoyances under which I felt an invented language shouldn’t suffer. I guess I figured that if you get a shot at making a perfect language, you should succeed.
One bother was typing, since Esperanto uses six characters with diacritics not to be found on my decidedly Western keyboard. Another was that the default gender for all nouns was masculine. In order to make a word feminine, you need to add a special feminine suffix. So, to make mother, you add a suffix to the word for father. This seemed unnecessarily sexist and ambiguous. I’d much prefer a language that had neuter words by default and both masculine and feminine suffixes, which also buys you expressivity.
Ido to the rescue! It was started by some dissatisfied Esperanto dudes and dudettes. It takes care of both those problems and does some other minor tweaks that I don’t care as much about. Come everyone, let’s frolic in a utopia of consistency of speech!
Tags: Language
[...] I started playing with the artificial language Esperanto and then Ido. I liked Ido more, as I explained at the time, because a few of its reforms were important to me (easier to type and less [...]
[...] why I have a love/hate relationship with constructed languages like Esperanto or Ido. Ido appeals to my order-loving half, but I ultimately find it too restrictive to be practical. Let [...]