{"id":1662,"date":"2011-08-01T10:00:58","date_gmt":"2011-08-01T08:00:58","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/elanguage.net\/blogs\/booknotices\/?p=1662"},"modified":"2011-07-28T10:00:01","modified_gmt":"2011-07-28T08:00:01","slug":"an-elementary-grammar-of-ido","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/journals.linguisticsociety.org\/booknotices\/?p=1662","title":{"rendered":"An elementary grammar of Ido"},"content":{"rendered":"
An elementary grammar of Ido:<\/strong> The auxiliary language Ido. By L. de Beaufront<\/strong>. <\/strong>(LINCOM grammatica 1.) Munich: LINCOM Europa, 2010. Pp. 32. ISBN 9783895863332<\/a>. $33.88.<\/div>\n

Reviewed by Peter Freeouf<\/a><\/strong>,Chiang Mai University<\/em><\/p>\n

This elementary grammar is designed to give a concise overview of Ido grammar and some practice in reading and writing short sentences. Ido is one of many international auxiliary languages constructed since the appearance in 1879 of the first auxiliary language to gain a significant following, Volapuk. Volapuk was quickly eclipsed by Esperanto, which first appeared in 1887 and rapidly gained numerous adherents through the ease of its simple and exceptionless sixteen basic rules of grammar and pronunciation<\/p>\n

Ido is a reformed version of Esperanto. In 1907, two years after the first Esperanto World Congress, a group primarily composed of Esperantists formed the Delegation for the Adoption of an International Auxiliary Language<\/a> to reform what they saw as flaws in Esperanto. Later that same year, the Delegation, now renamed a Committee, joined with the representative of the international Esperanto organization, Louis de Beaufront, to propose a number of changes to Esperanto. After these were rejected, de Beaufront became a leading proponent of the newly devised Ido. Ido gained some adherents over the years but has remained on the fringes of the international auxiliary language movement. The Danish linguist Otto Jespersen was an early proponent but left the movement in 1929 to publish his own planned language, Novial. According to the Wikipedia website for Ido (http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Ido<\/a>), Ido has had between two thousand and five thousand speakers in recent years.<\/p>\n

This booklet is a reprint of the original London edition of 1918. There is a short introduction, \u2018What is Ido?\u2019, and \u2018Pronunciation\u2019 is covered on one page (4). There then follow ten lessons, each devoted to several aspects of the grammar and concluded with two exercises. The first consists of disconnected Ido sentences, the second of English sentences to be translated into Ido. The next-to-last section (19\u201320) contains a summary of the basic nominal and verbal inflectional endings and a list of the derivational prefixes and suffixes. The last section (21\u201324) is a short Ido-English vocabulary.<\/p>\n

As presented in this booklet, Ido appears closer to the Romance languages than is Esperanto, with its Greek-like nominal endings. Ido infinitives end in -r, a Romance-like feature, and the last syllable of the infinitive is stressed, an exception to the general rule of penultimate stress. Ido uses no diacritics, unlike Esperanto, and its personal pronoun system is much more complex than Esperanto\u2019s.<\/p>\n

It is hard to say whom this grammar of Ido would interest outside the small circle of scholars interested in the history of international auxiliary languages. These languages, though, do have a history and a web of interrelationships. They give a fascinating side tour in modern intellectual history, since the more successful of them originated in an era with a belief in progress and human solidarity that was stronger and more widespread than today.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

An elementary grammar of Ido: The auxiliary language Ido. By L. de Beaufront. (LINCOM grammatica 1.) Munich: LINCOM Europa, 2010. Pp. 32. ISBN 9783895863332. $33.88. Reviewed by Peter Freeouf,Chiang Mai University This elementary grammar is designed to give a concise overview of Ido grammar and some practice in reading and writing short sentences. Ido is […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/journals.linguisticsociety.org\/booknotices\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1662"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/journals.linguisticsociety.org\/booknotices\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/journals.linguisticsociety.org\/booknotices\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/journals.linguisticsociety.org\/booknotices\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/journals.linguisticsociety.org\/booknotices\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1662"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/journals.linguisticsociety.org\/booknotices\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1662\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1663,"href":"https:\/\/journals.linguisticsociety.org\/booknotices\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1662\/revisions\/1663"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/journals.linguisticsociety.org\/booknotices\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1662"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/journals.linguisticsociety.org\/booknotices\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1662"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/journals.linguisticsociety.org\/booknotices\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1662"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}