REVIEWS 699 



Complete Manual of the Auxiliary Language Ido. Grammar, Grammatical 

 Exercises, Key Ido-English and English-Ido Vocabularies. Revised 

 by L. de Beaufront, President of the French Idistic Society. In 

 conformity with the decisions of the Ido Academy. [Pp. xiv+ 194.] 

 (London : Sir Isaac Pitman & Sons, 1919. Price 55. net.) 



In Science Progress of January 1920 we published some correspondence 

 on the respective merits of Latin and of Ido as an international language ; 

 and this little book will enable those who are not familiar with the latter 

 to understand its scope and advantages. Ido is, of course, derived very 

 largely from Dr. Zamenhof's Esperanto. The great beauty of both lan- 

 guages consists in the extreme simplicity of their grammar and in their 

 euphonious Italian syllabication. In fact, they can be almost called Spanish 

 or Italian without the complicated grammars. For instance, every single 

 substantive ends in and every plural substantive in i, while every adjec- 

 tive ends in a and every adverb in e. One could almost speak these tongues 

 on this information alone if one remembers that nearly all the roots are 

 Latin. Esperanto had the great defect that some consonants with circum- 

 flex accents over them were employed — thus at once limiting its adapta- 

 bility for printing, because few founts of type contain such marked letters. 

 Esperanto also differentiated the accusative case by the addition of the 

 letter n ; but Ido does this only in the case of accusatives placed before the 

 verb. And there are other small differences. All the same we cannot say 

 that Ido is much more euphonious than Esperanto as claimed in the Intro- 

 duction ; and we may doubt whether it cannot be improved still further, 

 and whether the appellation " final international language " will be every- 

 where accepted. For example, would it not be better to use Latin and 

 Greek roots entirely where suitable ones exist, in preference to taking occa- 

 sional roots from German and English such as " warfo " for " wharf," and 

 "welder" to weld, " westo " the west, and " whisto " for whist? This 

 practice appears to us to be an unnecessary tax on the memory, because 

 almost everyone knows the Latin and Greek roots and would naturally 

 employ them in international speech. I once heard a great scholar main- 

 tain that Milton's Latin verse would outlive his Paradise Lost. Why ? 

 because Latin and Greek are likely to outlast all modern languages. And I 

 think that there is much in this argument. 



Those who have not examined little books like these laugh at artificial 

 languages because they do not understand how extremely easy it is to learn 

 them. But, more than that, these artificial languages must be a very good 

 training for learning natural ones — as is quite justifiably claimed in the 

 Foreword. 



After all, I am inclined to think that English can be made the Inter- 

 national language if only we would be wise enough to change our ridiculous 

 irregular spelling. A large majority of our roots are from the Latin or 

 Greek, and our grammar is extremely simple except for our irregular verbs. 

 On the other hand, it is a harsh language and contains no less than thirteen 

 different vowels, which are almost always too much for foreigners. How 

 hopeless English spelling really is can be known only by those who have 

 studied the innumerable new schemes of spelling which have been proposed 

 during the last two centuries — and all of which have failed. 



R. R. 



