3 History

The request by the Delegation for the Adoption of an International Auxiliary Language to the International Association of Academies in ViennaThis article is about the city and federal state in Austria. For other places or things called Vienna, see Vienna (disambiguation). Vienna ( German: Wien [viːn]) is the capital of Austria, and also one of Austria's nine federal states Bundesland Wi to select an international language was rejected in May, 1907. The Delegation, which had been founded by Louis CouturatLouis Couturat ( January 17, 1868- August 3, 1914) was a French linguist, philosopher, logician, and mathematician. He was born in Ris-Orangis (near Paris), France and was educated as a philosopher and mathematician at the Ecole Normale Superieure. He the, decided to meet as a Committee in Paris in October 1907Events January events January 6 Maria Montessori opens her first school and daycare center for working class children in Rome Casa dei Bambini in San Lorenzo). January 14 An earthquake in Kingston, Jamaica kills more than a 1,000 January 23 Charles Curtis to discuss the adoption of a standard international language among the various competitors that had been devised up to that time. According to the minutes of the Committee, it decided that no language was completely acceptable, but that Esperanto could be accepted "because of its relative perfection and because of the many and diverse applications already received by it, on condition of several modifications to be realized by the permanent Commission in the direction defined by the conclusions of the Report of the Secretaries (Couturat and Leopold Leau ) and by the Ido project" which later had been presented to the Committee as an anonymous project. The Ido project has later been suggested to have been primarily devised by Couturat with some help from Esperanto's representative before the Committee, Louis de Beaufront . Beaufront had himself argued for reforming Esperanto prior to having been selected to the Delegation, and during the proceedings he argued in favor of Esperanto over other languages; his "conversion" to the Ido camp upon the presentation of that language was thus consistent with his earlier positions.

Early supporters of Esperanto tended to resist reforms, and the language's inventor, L. L. ZamenhofLudovic Lazarus (Ludwik Lejzer) Zamenhof ( December 15, 1859 April 14, 1917) was a Polish-Jewish ophthalmologist, philologist, and the initiator of Esperanto, the most widely spoken planned language to date. His native languages were Russian and Yiddish, deferred to their judgement. Ironically, several of the reforms adopted by Ido were themselves proposed at various times by Zamenhof. The custom of keeping the basic rules of Esperanto fixed remains today. Couturat, who was the leading proponent of Ido, was killed in an automobile accident in 1914Events January 4 77 seal hunters freeze to death on ice near Labrador January 5 Ford Motor Company announces an eight-hour workday and a minimum wage of $5 for a day's labor February 13 Copyright: In New York City the ASCAP (for American Society of Compos, which, along with World War IWorld War I (also known as the First World War , the Great War the War of the Nations and the "War to End All Wars") was a world conflict occurring from 1914 to 1918. No previous conflict had mobilized so many soldiers, or involved so many in the field of, dealt a serious blow to the Ido movement. Although that movement recovered to some degree in the immediate postwar period, the whole movement of international languages became Balkanized as a result of Couturat's death. The publication of an even more Europeanized planned language, Occidental, in 1922 began the process of splintering the community, and the Ido movement lost a majority of its published periodicals in the subsequent year or so, and the defection of its major intellectual supporter, the Danish linguist Otto Jespersen, in 1928 on the occasion of the publication of his own planned language Novial, seemed at the time to provide a quietus.

However, the language still has a few speakers today, and the internet has sparked a renewal of interest in the language in recent years. The estimates of the number of speakers range from 250-5000. In comparison, Esperanto has approximately 1.6 million speakers, according to a retired psychology professor named Sidney S. Culbert, who conducted a survey of speakers of several world-wide languages. The same number appears in the Almanac World Book of Facts , and in Ethnologue.

Jespersen, who was present during the ten days of Committee deliberations in Paris and later served as part of the permanent Commission, wrote a history of Ido.

Many Esperanto supporters have attacked Ido over the years. One of them, Don Harlow , wrote a history of Ido in the third chapter of The Esperanto Book, "How to Build a Language". There have been many questions about the validity of his history, to which he replies in a subchapter, "Ido: The Beginning". However, most Ido partisans argue that Harlow's history does not jibe with all the eyewitness accounts, such as those reported by Jespersen, although it is based on material from some other eyewitnesses such as Emile Boirac and Gaston Moch and with some source documentation, to which Harlow claims Jespersen did not have access (such as Zamenhof's correspondence with Couturat and others during the period).

4 Recent International Ido Conventions

2004: Kyiv, Ukraine - 17 participants from 9 countries (Raporto)
2003: Grossbothen, Germany - Participants from 6 countries (Raporto)
2002: Kraków, Poland - 14 participants from 6 countries (Raporto)
2001: Nuremberg, Germany - 14 participants from 5 countries (Raporto)
1998: Bialobrzegi, Poland - 15 participants from 6 countries
1997: Bakkum (mun. Castricum), Netherlands - 19 participants from 7 countries
1995: Elsnigk, Germany
1991: Ostend, Belgium - 21 participants
1980: Namur, Belgium - 35 participants
1960: Zürich, Switzerland - ca. 50 participants

5 External links

• Ido language Wikipedia
• Langmaker.com about ido
• Page about the Ido language
• Otto Jespersen's history of Ido
• Another history of Ido
• Don Harlow's "How to Build a Language", the section about Ido
• Don Harlow's "Ido: The Beginning"
• Emile Boirac's "Report to the World Esperanto Congress, 1908" about his experiences as part of the Delegation's Committee
• Léopold Leau's "The Truth About the Delegation in 1907", a rebuttal of criticisms made about the events of the Delegation, based on his own experiences as a member of the Delegation
• Ido-Pagino da Ailanto - Some discussion about Ido, and links to websites, organizations, mailing lists, courses, dictionaries, grammars, e.c.
• Kompleta Gramatiko Detaloza di la Linguo Internaciona Ido (PDF)
• Kompleta Gramatiko Detaloza di la Linguo Internaciona Ido (HTML)
• Kompleta Gramatiko Detaloza di la Linguo Internaciona Ido (HTML)

International auxiliary languages

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