Comparison Between Esperanto and Ido - Vocabulary

Vocabulary

Although both Esperanto and Ido share a large amount of vocabulary, there are differences. The creators of Ido felt that much of Esperanto was either not internationally recognizable, or unnecessarily deformed, and aimed to fix these with more "international" or "corrected" roots. This can sometimes be at the expense of Esperanto's simpler word building process.

Ido, unlike Esperanto, does not assume the male sex by default. For example, Ido does not derive the word for waitress by adding a feminine suffix to waiter, as Esperanto does. Instead, Ido words are defined as sex-neutral, and two different suffixes derive masculine and feminine words from the root: servisto for a waiter of either sex, servistulo for a male waiter, and servistino for a waitress. There are only two exceptions to this rule: First, patro for father, matro for mother, and genitoro for parent, and second, viro for man, muliero for woman, and adulto for adult.

Below are some examples in first Esperanto then Ido with English, French, German, Italian, Spanish and Portuguese for linguistic comparison:

Note that three of the languages chosen in this chart are Romance languages and that English has also had large influences from French and Latin. In comparison, Esperanto is somewhat more influenced by German vocabulary and Slavic semantics (as in the case of prefix mal-) and has more priority over word compounding by affixes.