How Ido Works

Ido is a rigorously agglutinative language, which is to say that it is entirely made up of roots and regularized affixes. In this way the language is a lot like a set of Lego bricks, for one can combine most any root with any other root or affix to form words in any part of speech.

For example, from the root bel- (“beautiful”):

That all words in Ido are built this way has the advantage of greatly reducing the number of words one needs to know in order to make oneself understood, for if one knows how to say to think in Ido (pensar), one automatically knows how to say a thought (penso), thinker (pensanto), thinking (pensanta), and so on — even if one has never encountered those words before.

Moreover, there are enough affixes in Ido to let one coin words on the fly should the need arise; if one doesn’t know the word for ugly (leda), for example, one can always say desbela “the-opposite-of-beautiful”. Indeed, one might even get away with desjorno (“the-opposite-of-day”, i.e., “night”) if one had to, though that would be extremely irregular.

It should be noted that Ido is more exact than English in that a root can usually have only one part of speech. For example, “hammer” is ordinarily a noun in English, but it can be used as a verb to mean “to strike with a hammer”. In Ido, the use of an instrument is indicated by -ag-, so “to hammer” is martelagar and “a hammering” is martelago. Similarly, “crown” can be both noun and verb in English; in Ido, krono is the noun, kronizar the verb (-iz- meaning “to provide with”). A coronation is kronizo.

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