One of the biggest problems facing the European Union today is the fact that within its borders, 23 languages are spoken. This means that all the important documents have to be translated by a whole army of translators, which costs the taxpayer more than 1 billion Euros a year - and companies trading within the EU spend millions more. The EU-funded TC-STAR project aims to tackle this issue with technology: a system that eats speech in one language, and outputs that same speech in another.
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Member since:2005-07-08
Another good article explaining the shortcomings and oddities of Esperanto and how Ido has overcome them in its own improved version of a constructed easy-to-use auxiliary language.
Why Ido?
http://idolinguo.org.uk/whyido.htm
Just a few examples from the article:
Why are so many things in Esperanto called non-something? Why can't there be a simple short word for "cheap", for example, but it is instead an unnecessarily long and complicated word malmultekosta (= not-costing much) while in Ido it is simply chipa. I don't think that Esperanto makes things any easier for new learners by that method. Like the article says: "The derivation of words from 'root' words is very confused in Esperanto, and only superficially simple."
Also, Ido uses just the basic letters which are common to most countries using the Latin alphabet, instead of the artificial extra letters of Esperanto that use circumflexes and breves, making typing or printing Ido much easier than Esperanto.
My own favorites of the three most popular auxiliary languages (Esperanto, Ido, Interlingua) would be, either Interlingua or Ido. Although neither of the two is quite as popular as Esperanto so far, Interlingua and Ido just sound more natural to me, and in many cases also make learning and saying things easier than Esperanto does.
Edited 2008-05-04 07:36 UTC
Member since:2008-05-05
Member since:2008-05-05
Quote: "Why are so many things in Esperanto called non-something?"
Take any article in Esperanto and count the number of mal-words in it. Look in the translation in English. You will find there a certain amount of un- or in- words. I bet you will find the numbers quite low in both cases.
Quote: "Why can't there be a simple short word for cheap"
There is! Esperanto a few synonyms.
kostly: multekosta, altapreza, kara.
cheap: malmultekosta, ĉipa.
and if you need it (in poems or songs) malaltapreza, malkara, malĉipa. Kara and ĉipa are considered "snobbish", but you may use them to show off.
Quote: "The derivation of words from 'root' words is very confused in Esperanto, and only superficially simple."
It is confused for those who don't understand it. In Esperanto the role of the context is greater than ido.
Esperanto has a very important rule for affixes that is lacking in Ido: the rule of "necessity and sufficiency". This makes the language much more flexible and pleasant to use. However Ido would probably be easier to translate automatically than Esperanto.
Quote: "Ido uses just the basic letters which are common to most countries using the Latin alphabet, instead of the artificial extra letters of Esperanto".
The letter in question are ĉ, ĝ, ĥ, ĵ, ŝ, ŭ, that can be alternatively written ch, gh, hh, jh, sh, or u without accent. So Esperanto can very well be written on any Latin keyboard. However, if you see my name written Remuŝ, you know I speak Esperanto. Anyway it does not require exceptional skills to write those letters.
Quoting: "Interlingua and Ido just sound more natural to me"
Ido sound much less natural than Esperanto to me.
Interlingua is a language meant to be easy to read (silently) for people who know a Romance language. It is much more difficult to use in normal conversation than Esperanto.
Remuŝ
Member since:
2005-07-08
Hmm... As a side note. it seems that Ido, the third big auxiliary language could avoid some of the shortcomings of both Esperanto and Interlingua. For example, it doesn't have the non-standard letters of Esperanto that use breves and circumflexes. If Esperanto could get rid of that major headache, I might be more supportive of it. Yet Ido still keeps the extremely systematic and easy grammar of Esperanto. See here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Esperanto_and_Ido_compared
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ido_and_Interlingua_compared
Too bad that the first world war almost destroyed the promising start of the Ido project.
Anyway, I don't believe that any of the current auxiliary languages could gain wide acceptance in international communication, like as an official language of some international organizations, before it would already have millions of active users and supporters otherwise, and so that it had already proven its wide acceptance elsewhere. However, English language already has that position in the world, like it or not, just like Latin had in the Middle Age western Europe.