ido after the break…
ido…
everyone seems to absolutely love my entry on the “back to tranquility lane” mod for the game “fallout 3″ for some reason. weird. well, sorry to disappoint but i really don’t have any more fallout 3 mods in the near future to review. apparently, no one is heck-bent on making quest mods for fallout 3 at the moment & i don’t have the energy to download a “house” (aka – vault) mod just to write that – yup, there’s a vault & it’s neat-o keen. to paraphrase the title on that dance video that everyone loves to parody right now – “put a quest on it.”
so, let me write about the auxiliary language “ido” instead.
yeah, i know – just what you wanted to read.
well, see, in a nutshell, here’s the grossly over-simplified history of artificial languages (and by “artificial,” i don’t mean “artificial intelligence,” like what computer scientists are trying to give computers so that they can take over the world).
ok, in europe, everyone is in a compressed area & they all speak different languages. over history, a dominant world culture has also had the de facto universal language. at one point, the language was latin, then it was french & it’s been english for about a century & change at this point.
however, national languages evolve & have a lot of weird-o rules that gunk up the system over time. english is notorious for their “i before e except after c” shenanigans that makes it an absolute pain to learn if you’ve never spoken it. even more “logical” languages tend to get cross-culture influences & exceptions to them. furthermore, if that language belongs to a country that is not particularly loved… *cough*usa*cough*, then, well, it’s really unfair to them.
so why not make an easy-to-use, neutral language that everyone can speak? you can speak your native tongue in your native land & then go abroad & speak the jibberjabber neutral language? sounds rather simple, right. yah…
well, the first neutral language to have any amount of success was called “volapuk.” i ain’t making that up, google it for yourself. volapuk worked for a while but then the creator didn’t want to make changes to the language that a lot of people wanted & it’s popularity waned.
then, a language that addressed a few of these issues emerged & that was called “esperanto.” most people who couldn’t care less about neutral languages have probably heard of “esperanto” & nothing else. esperanto, quite frankly, had the greatest chance to actually be that bona fide neutral language that neutral languages dream about becoming. in fact, in 1910 or whenever, there was a huge conference where all of the neutral language people converged to pick a neutral language.
well, the esperantists got a bit bent out of shape when the committee that was looking over all of these languages decided that esperanto needed some tweaking. the esperantists really didn’t cotton too well to the idea that their precise baby that, btw, could do no wrong, needed adjusting. however, adjustments occured & the resulting language was called “ido.”
“ido,” for a brief while, looked as though it might eclipse esperanto but one of the main people behind ido died in a car accident early on. also, the esperantists had turned more then a bit religious nutty fanatico about their language & started doing all sorts of nasty things to torpedo ido before it could get a chance to prove itself.
one of the people behind “ido” decided that ido, like esperanto, was too regular & needed more variation, like a normal language. they called their language “novial” & it promptly went absolutely nowhere very quickly although mark twain supposedly gave it a huge thumbs up at some point before he dropped dead.
a group of people studying neutral languages, the iala (no, i forgot what the acronym stands for) decided that they were going to get in on the neutral language creation act & created their own neutral language called “interlingua” which was supposed to be even more natural looking then novial was. interlingua enjoyed the briefest of success with some international trade groups before even those trade groups realized that no one was interested in speaking a neutral language & it dropped off the face of the earth.
i’m cutting about a bajillion of other minor neutral languages that enjoyed it’s 15 seconds of fame – ro, sona, klingon, occidental, loglan/lojban, whatever those fcuking hobbits spoke in the “lord of the rings” novels but, at the end of the day, you get the drift – there really hasn’t been a major neutral language to emerge after the 1950s & that’s going to be about 60 years ago in another year or two. yes, i know that the internet has revived every stupid neutral language on the known planet but i don’t count “internet neutral languages” primarily because the internet makes it far too easy for stupid ideas to gain acceptance. to wit, someone could fart on youtube & it could get 1,000 views.
everyone always recommends “esperanto” if you ever want to partake in the mission: impossible of learning a neutral language but esperanto has far too much dirty laundry to give it the time of day. really, in my opinion, if the esperantists had swallowed their pride just a tad maybe “ido” would be spoken worldwide today by billions of people & people would’ve stopped snickering whenever some tried to place “neutral language” & “practical” in the same sentence without busting a gut laughing.
i’m not saying “ido” is perfect but check it out – you get your esperanto experience minus the annoying glitches that comes with esperanto. yeah, ido also has skeletons in it’s closet (after all, it’s derived from esperanto so those stains don’t come completely off) but your choices beyond that is a language no one speaks, another language no one speaks & a language made for a fictional race of outer-space bullies made purposefully to sound as stupid as possible.
or you can do nothing. which is what most people have done about this anyway.
i didn’t realize i’d write so much about this. i’m stopping now.
Tags: esperanto, ido, interlingua, novial
