Gilles-Philippe Morin
Sun May 4 15:59:16 49558,
You said Ido is "still extremely Eurocentric". Why do you criticize Ido for not being what it doesn’t strive to be? To me, it would be like criticizing Ithkuil for not being an auxiliary language. Or Klingon for being too difficult to learn.
The Délégation pour l’Adoption d’une Langue Auxiliaire Internationale (Delegation for the Adoption of an International Auxiliary Language) adopted the following declaration in 1907 (translated to English in the Complete Manual of the Auxiliary Language Ido, 1919, p. X):
"DECLARATION OF PROGRAMME OF DELEGATION.
"1. To select and promote the use of an auxiliary international language destined not to replace the national languages in their everyday use, but to serve as a means of communication between people speaking different languages.
"2. In order to fulfil usefully its intended purpose, an international auxiliary language ought to satisfy the following conditions: (a) It must meet the requirements of ordinary social life, and also those of commerce, science, and philosophy.
(b) It must be easily acquired by people having an ordinary elementary education, and especially by the people of European civilization.
(c) It must not be one of the national languages."
Now, your "ranking" of favorite auxiliary languages seems to overlook the fact that international auxiliary languages don’t necessarily have the same goals — and thus the same criteria. Pretty much all of them agree for 1 and 2c; however, Ido is unapologetically Eurocentric with 2b, and could you please explain me how Toki Pona is superior to Ido in regard to 2a?
Ido was one of the first auxiliary languages designed with scientific use in mind. You can read more about that in the book Scientific Babel by Michael Gordin (2015). Notably, many scientists complained that the Fundamento forced them to use the very Latin "hidrargo" instead of the international "merkurio".
For that reason, even the very early Ido dictionaries (1908) contained words such as "acetileno", "akromata", "akumulatoro", "akustiko", "albumino", "atomo", "chankro", "glikozo" and of course… "merkuryo" (now merkurio).
Now, where is Toki Pona’s periodic table? What is "glucose" in Toki Pona?
How can you conceive Toki Pona as being a better auxiliary language than Ido if it cannot even compete with the level of versatility that Ido had in 1908? The truth is, Toki Pona was not designed to replace English in scientific literature. Ido was, even from the beginning.
Finally, as a side note, Ido’s "Eurocentric" system did not block words with non-European origin from entering the language. The word for Esperanto’s "ĉu" is "ka(d)", which according to the Ido-English Dictionary (Luther H. Dyer, 1924, p. 157) comes from… Sanskrit. Many European words also come from Arabic (e.g. adobo, alkaldo, alkemio, algebro, algoritmo, alkoholo, almanako, amalgamo, ambro, admiralo, arobo, asasino, azimuto, azuro, baldakino, baobabo, bergamoto, kafeo, kalibro, karafo, karato, cheko, divano, shako, jirafo, gitaro, hazardo, hashisho, limono, limonado, magazino, matraco, mumio, moskeo, nenufaro, oranjo, siropo, sukro, zero), Nahuatl (e.g. avokado, axolotlo, chokolado, koyoto, oceloto, tomato), Quechua (e.g. kokao, kokaino, lamao, pumao, quinino, vikuno), Eskimo-Aleut (e.g. anorako, igluo, kayako), Arawakan (e.g. kaimano, kanoo, hamako, iguano, savano, tabako), Tupi-Guaraní (e.g. kayeno, jaguaro, manioko, petunio, tapiokao, tapiro, tukano), Aymara (e.g. alpako), Cariban (e.g. kanibalo), Cherokee (e.g. sequoyo), Taino (e.g. patato), Sanskrit (e.g. Aryana, atolo, kandio, shakalo, junglo, mandarino, pantero, puncho), Hebrew (e.g. abako, amen, Babel, kerubo, edeno, jubileo, manao, mesio, pasko, farizeo, sabato, amonito, makadamo, sodomio), Japanese (e.g. soyo), Turkic (e.g. kazako, kalpak, turkezo, yogurto), etc. The fact Ido is based on European languages does not mean the origin of these words restrict themselves to European borders.
All in all, I do not see how an international auxiliary language could be easy to learn, easy to use and easy to understand without being at least a bit Eurocentric in design. Take Chinese for instance. Arbitrarily incorporating more Chinese words into Ido would be pointless, since Chinese itself is mutually unintelligible, it’s strongly tonal (which Ido is not) and it doesn’t use the English alphabet (which Ido uses). An Ido word based solely on (Mandarin) Chinese would probably not even be recognizable to a Chinese person. Ido would thus fare no better than Volapük — which Schleyer deformed especially to make the etymology harder to recognize. In the end, Schleyer’s clever system (that even lacked R to be easy for the Chinese!) rather made Europeans crave Esperanto’s vocabulary and grammar and ended up with… Idiom Neutral and Volapük Nulik.
