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Methodology

Esperanto vs Ido: The 1907 Schism, and Why Esperanto Won

Ido vs Esperanto: the Delegation, Beaufront's betrayal, what Ido actually changed, and why the reformed language lost to the original anyway. The whole story, with a verdict.

By Michael McGettrick5 Sept 202624 min read

Esperanto vs Ido: The Schism That Settled the Argument

In 1907 the international language movement performed the most instructive experiment in its history. It took Esperanto, fixed several of its genuine flaws, published the result under a new name, and watched the fixed version lose. If you want to understand why languages spread, and why "better designed" so rarely beats "already spoken", Esperanto vs Ido is the cleanest case study there is. It also happens to be a genuinely dramatic story, complete with a secret identity and a betrayal.

The Delegation

The 1900 Paris World's Fair had made the language problem feel urgent: international congresses were multiplying and interpreters were not. Two French academics, the logician Louis Couturat and Léopold Leau, founded the Delegation for the Adoption of an International Auxiliary Language, and spent years collecting signatures from learned societies and academics for a simple plan: an expert committee would examine the candidate languages and pick one, and the world's scholars would then get behind the winner.

In October 1907 the committee met in Paris. Esperanto, by then twenty years old and by far the largest movement, was the obvious frontrunner. Its case was presented by Louis de Beaufront, the language's most prominent French champion and the man Zamenhof trusted to represent him.

The committee's verdict was a lawyer's masterpiece: Esperanto was adopted "in principle", but subject to reforms along the lines of a project submitted anonymously under the pseudonym "Ido" (Esperanto for "offspring"). In other words: your language wins, provided it becomes a different language.

The betrayal

Then the story turns into a novel. Within months it emerged that the anonymous reform project had come from inside the house: Louis de Beaufront, Esperanto's own advocate before the committee, declared himself the author of Ido, with Couturat closely involved. The man sent to defend Esperanto had been holding the rival's manuscript. Esperantists have been arguing about the exact division of guilt ever since, but the shape of it was plain enough at the time: the verdict was not an evaluation, it was an ambush.

Zamenhof and the Esperanto establishment refused the ultimatum. The movement split, and the world got a twenty-year live trial of a question that is usually only argued in the abstract: what happens when a modestly improved version of a language competes with the installed base of the original?

What Ido actually changed

Credit where due: several Ido reforms attacked real weaknesses. The main changes:

  • The accented letters are gone. Esperanto's ĉ, ĝ, ĥ, ĵ, ŝ and ŭ were a genuine nuisance for typewriters and printers in 1907, and Esperantists themselves still resort to workarounds like the x-system when a keyboard fails them. Ido restricted itself to the bare Latin alphabet.
  • Adjectives no longer agree. Esperanto says la belaj hundoj, marking the plural on noun and adjective alike. Ido says la bela hundi: mark it once, on the noun. One of the commonest beginner errors in Esperanto simply cannot be made in Ido.
  • The accusative is optional. Esperanto marks every direct object with -n, which buys free word order at the price of the single most persistent learner mistake in the language. Ido uses it only when the object comes before the subject.
  • Plurals end in -i, Italian-style, rather than Esperanto's -oj.
  • The correlatives were dismantled. Esperanto builds its question and pointer words from a strict grid (kio, tio, ĉio, nenio and forty-one relatives). Ido swapped much of the grid for more recognisably Latin-derived words, trading systematic learnability for at-sight familiarity.
  • Vocabulary drifted towards its sources, so an Ido text often looks a shade more like Romance and less like itself. The verb to be shows the family resemblance and the difference at once: Esperanto esti, Ido esar; "the book is on the table" comes out la libro estas sur la tablo against la libro esas sur la tablo.

Taken line by line, this is a defensible engineering review. Some of it (adjective agreement in particular) is hard to argue against on pure design grounds. Which is exactly what makes the outcome so instructive.

Why Esperanto won anyway

The Fundamento made Esperanto un-splittable. At the first World Congress in Boulogne-sur-Mer in 1905, the movement had declared the Fundamento de Esperanto, the 1887 core of the language, permanently untouchable. New words could be added; the foundation could never be revised. This looked conservative and pedantic, and it turned out to be the single smartest decision in the language's history. When the reformers came, there was nothing to negotiate: the core was not on the table, so the only way to reform Esperanto was to leave it. Everyone who stayed knew the language they had learned would still be the language in thirty years. It is, and it was: the Esperanto of 1905 is fully readable to a learner today.

The community stayed. The usual estimate is that a noticeable fraction of the movement's leadership defected to Ido while the overwhelming majority of ordinary members stayed put, and the asymmetry is the whole lesson. The leaders were comparing grammars; the members had books, magazines, clubs, correspondents and friends, all in Esperanto. A language is its speakers, and the speakers had somewhere to be.

Ido could not stop being Ido. A language founded on the principle that reform is legitimate has no answer when the next reformer arrives. Ido spent its early years revising itself, declared a moratorium in 1913 to try to stop the churn, lost Couturat to a car accident at the outbreak of war in 1914, and then bled its intellectuals to newer projects: Edgar de Wahl's Occidental in 1922, and Novial in 1928, built by Otto Jespersen, a linguist who had sat on the original Ido committee. The reform movement kept reforming until there was nobody left to reform. Esperanto's "flaws", meanwhile, sat there unrepaired, doing no measurable harm to the one thing that mattered: people using the language.

Ido survives today as a small, earnest community with a magazine and a few hundred speakers at the most generous count. Esperanto has an annual world congress, original literature, somewhere between tens of thousands and a couple of million speakers depending on your threshold, and native speakers. The experiment has run for over a century. The result is not close.

The moral, and what it means for you

The schism settled a question that keeps being re-asked in every generation of conlangs: no, a better-engineered auxiliary language does not beat an established one, because the value of a shared language is the people you share it with. Stability beats optimisation. The perfect is the enemy of the spoken.

That is also precisely why this site teaches Esperanto and not one of its tidier children. If you are choosing a constructed language to actually learn, the design differences between Esperanto and Ido are a rounding error next to the community difference. Esperanto is genuinely easy, takes 150 to 200 hours to comfortable conversation, and is worth learning for reasons that survive scrutiny. Our Esperanto course is built frequency-first: the 1,000 most useful words in order, audio in two accents, a dedicated track for the affix system, and graded stories at strict vocabulary ceilings.

Learn the language with the people in it. The 1907 committee, in its way, proved why.

Cross-references

Frequently asked

What is the difference between Esperanto and Ido?

Ido is a reformed Esperanto, published in 1907. The main changes: the six accented letters are gone, adjectives no longer agree with nouns, the accusative -n is only used when word order is inverted, plurals end in -i rather than -oj, the table of correlatives is replaced with more Latin-derived words, and vocabulary generally leans closer to its Romance sources. The two languages are close enough that a speaker of one can read the other with a little squinting.

Why did Ido fail?

Three compounding reasons. Esperanto's Fundamento, declared untouchable in 1905, meant the parent language could not fragment further, while Ido, founded on the principle that reform is legitimate, kept being reformed and re-reformed, exhausting its own supporters. The community largely stayed with Esperanto: by the usual estimates most ordinary members remained even though a noticeable slice of the leadership defected. And Ido lost its driving force when Louis Couturat died in 1914, just as the First World War froze the whole movement.

Is Ido easier than Esperanto?

Marginally, on paper. No adjective agreement and no compulsory accusative genuinely remove two things learners get wrong, and the unaccented alphabet was a real advantage in the typewriter era. But the difference is small next to the difference in what your hours buy: Esperanto has courses, books, congresses, music and speakers to use it with. An easy language you can use with almost nobody is not, in any practical sense, easier.

Does anyone still speak Ido?

Yes, a small and rather likeable community keeps it alive, with a magazine (Progreso) and occasional meetings. Estimates of active speakers run to a few hundred at most. That is the fate the schism settled more than a century ago: Ido survives as a historical society, Esperanto as a language.