Ido

Following on from the previous post, below is a translation of the Ido words (which I created using the German original and English translation) into English. As for how I am going to present my analysis, I have decided to give the translation line by line as definition terms and definition descriptions in a definition list. The translation itself will be what I call “word literal”, that is, a translation where the order of English words tries to reflect the order of the Ido words, even if this is an unnatural order for English. The intent is to make clearer the meaning of the individual Ido words, to give a sense of the grammar behind Ido, and to convey how the ideas are built up word by word throughout a line, such as whether a particularly powerful word is saved for the end of the line, or used to start a line. For extra comparison, the German and English lyrics can be found side by side on Wikipedia.

It’s not just you, there really is a lot of mention about this language, so much so that I’ve created a category in my blog for it. Also, I do have a tendency to write long posts, which is why to some extent the previous post, this post, and the next post form a series. Originally I had intended to include the English and Ido lyrics (and possibly the German too) in one blog post, but accepted that some people may not want or need a language other than Ido to fully appreciate the words. Having the translation in another post also allows the reader to flick between the two languages at will, rather than scroll up and down or have two copies of the same over-long page open viewing different parts. In the next post, then, I will present a line-by-line translation into English of my words, and in the process explain some of the choices I made in translating “Ode to Joy” into Ido. Firstly, however, there are some general things I want to say about what I wanted to achieve with these words.

Sometimes my muse encourages me to work away at an idea that has entered my head just fleetingly as the combination of two easily dismissed thoughts. Recently, two such thoughts were “How easy is it to create culture, like a song, in Ido?” and “What would Europe’s national anthem be, if it was a single nation?” These both have answers on their own, since music has been written with Ido lyrics (even annoyingly catchy songs), and the Europe Union does have an anthem, that being the theme from the fourth movement of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony. In English the theme is known as “Ode to Joy”, and Beethoven’s tune originally had German lyrics to it, but for the purposes of the European Union, there are no words with official status. The fact that the EU is unable to do something as common as having words to its anthem should be a sign of how much “custom sternly divides” it, and the need for a common language. I am very impressed with an effort to express the modern ideals of Europe using the ancient language of Latin, but I still feel that Ido has the sort of modern flexibility and ease of use that make it a better candidate for a means of linguistically uniting us. That is why I have been working passionately, and enjoyably on this task. I unfortunately am not the greatest student of Ido, so I may have to amend this text as I get better, but here it is as it stands currently:

Open standards create value. Not the exclusive sort of “value” which means blocking competitors from entering the market, but the inclusive sort, where anyone can benefit from the low barriers to entry and compete based on the quality of what they build using those standards. Of course, you already know this or at least I don’t need to explain it again, but sometimes ideas can be made more reusable (for inspiring other ideas) with the help of a good example. You could say that human memory itself is an open standard, in that the means for committing an idea to memory (at least temporarily) is well known: memory is automatic.

Here’s my view on some standards issues which have come up recently. First, I noticed that WordPress says “UTF-8 is recommended” and makes that the default under “Encoding for pages and feeds”. I have not used any non-Roman characters yet, but I would like to say a big 你好 to my chinese readers (both of you). Let us not forget of course that UTF-8 is an encoding for Unicode, which is based on the international standard ISO / IEC 10646.

Speaking of standards and languages, I feel I should point out there is one language to rule them all, an artificial auxiliary language called Ido. It is basically “reformed Esperanto”, removing Esperanto’s bizarre accents and unnecessary complications, while making it more international and gender-neutral. One example would be that the Esperanto word “ŝarĝaŭto” becomes the Ido word “charioto”. As for its “blessing” by a standards body:

In January 1901 the Delegation for the Adoption of an International Auxiliary Language was founded. After six years of preparatory studies, a committee was elected and it met for 18 long sessions in October 1907. … The Committee decided in principle to adopt Esperanto, but with various changes which were to be carried out by a sub-committee, the Permanent Commission. … The improved version of Esperanto became known as Ido.”

I was once asked if Esperanto was an [ISO] standard, but I don’t think you can standardise a living language. If ISO was to standardise anything, I hope they would pick Ido.