From: 72627.2647@compuserve.com (Don HARLOW)
Newsgroups: soc.culture.esperanto
Subject: Re: Ido vs. Esperanto
Date: 6 Sep 92 03:58:33 GMT
Distribution: inet
Organization: The Internet

To: Esperanto >INTERNET:esperanto@rand.org

Dato: 920905

Bruce Gilson has posted some remarks about Ido's "improvements" 
to Esperanto.

>Ido uses no diacritical marks. It
>follows the suggested alternatives 
>provided by Zamenhof himself in using
>ch and sh

These are _permitted_ alternatives, not _suggested_ ones, for use 
in emergency situations (Z himself almost never used them, and 
then -- with one exception that I know of -- only in telegrams).

The use of digraphs is, speaking generally, an inappropriate system 
for an agglutinative language, since the digraphic combinations can 
occur accidentally during agglutination. This is not to say that they 
are equally inappropriate for Ido; I do not know how far agglutination 
is used in its word-formation system.

>Since, of the major languages of the
>world, only Japanese and the Indic
>languages are not SVO in declarative
>sentences, this is in fact the natural
>way of doing it.

The "natural" way of doing something would be done by everybody 
(the Mayas, whose world was rather bounded, would have considered 
VOS the "natural" way of doing it). As long as you have even one 
counterexample, we are simply talking about "historical accident", 
not "naturalness".

(Incidentally, the Spanish -- who use an SVO word order -- have 
found it necessary to reevolve an accusative morpheme for animate 
nouns; and speakers of Afrikaans and Romanian have done something 
similar.)

>(Zamenhof misused
>it [the accusative] himself in several of his writings!
>And I presume he was an expert on his
>own creation.) 

In the two-volumes, 600-800 pages, of "Leteroj de Zamenhof", 
which I've read and reread about three times (not looking for 
grammatical errors, though), Z may have misused the accusative 
half a dozen times -- and other points of grammar an equal number 
of times each. Can any of us here say that we could do as well in 
our own native languages, especially when penning off a long, 
urgent letter by candlelight after spending a hard day treating the 
eyes of three dozen people at 20 kopeks each? How many times 
have you used a preposition to end a sentence with? How many 
times have you forgotten to not split an infinitive? How often have 
you shocked the person who you were speaking to by using the 
wrong pronoun form?

It would be nice to have a language that didn't permit its users to 
make occasional errors. Esperanto is not that language. Given that 
the issue of "Ido-Vivo" I was given several years ago spent a page 
or two complaining of the numerous linguistic errors in its sister 
publication "Progreso", I doubt whether Ido is, either.

=============================================
Don HARLOW                                Redaktoro Esperanto U.S.A.
tel. (1 510) 222 0187
CompuServe [72627,2647]
Internet 72627.2647@compuserve.com

"The support of artificial auxiliary languages such as Esperanto 
has no place in the national socialist state. Their use leads to 
a weakening of the essential values of national characteristics. 
This is why all promotion of the teaching of such languages 
should be avoided and classrooms should not be made available 
for teaching them."
                               Decree of the National and 
                               Prussian Minister for Science, 
                               Training and People's Edu-
                                cation Bernhard Rust, May 
                                17, 1935, The Third Reich
(By their enemies ye shall know them.)
=============================================