Grammar
Each word in the Ido vocabulary is built from a root word. A word consists of a root and a grammatical ending. Other words can be formed from that word by removing the grammatical ending and adding a new one, or by inserting certain affixes between the root and the grammatical ending.
Some of the grammatical endings are defined as follows:
| Grammatical form | Ido | English | Esperanto | ||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Singular noun | -o (libro) | book | -o (libro) | ||
| Plural noun | -i (libri) | books | -oj (libroj) | ||
| Adjective | -a (varma) | warm | -a (varma) | ||
| Adverb | -e (varme) | warmly | -e (varme) | ||
| Present tense infinitive | -ar (irar) | to be going | to go | -anti (iranti) | -i (iri) |
| Past tense infinitive | -ir (irir) | to have gone | -inti (irinti) | ||
| Future tense infinitive | -or (iror) | to be going to go | -onti (ironti) | ||
| Present | -as (iras) | go, goes | -as (iras) | ||
| Past | -is (iris) | went | -is (iris) | ||
| Future | -os (iros) | will go | -os (iros) | ||
| Imperative | -ez (irez) | go! | -u (iru) | ||
| Conditional | -us (irus) | would go | -us (irus) | ||
These are the same as in Esperanto except for -i, -ir, -ar, -or and -ez. Esperanto marks noun plurals by an agglutinative ending -j (so plural nouns end in -oj), uses -i for verb infinitives (Esperanto infinitives are tenseless), and uses -u for the imperative. Verbs in Ido do not conjugate depending on person, number or gender; the -as, -is, and -os endings suffice whether the subject is I, you, he, she, they, or anything else.
Read more about this topic: Ido
Famous quotes containing the word grammar:
“Grammar is a tricky, inconsistent thing. Being the backbone of speech and writing, it should, we think, be eminently logical, make perfect sense, like the human skeleton. But, of course, the skeleton is arbitrary, too. Why twelve pairs of ribs rather than eleven or thirteen? Why thirty-two teeth? It has something to do with evolution and functionalism—but only sometimes, not always. So there are aspects of grammar that make good, logical sense, and others that do not.”
—John Simon (b. 1925)
“Syntax is the study of the principles and processes by which sentences are constructed in particular languages. Syntactic investigation of a given language has as its goal the construction of a grammar that can be viewed as a device of some sort for producing the sentences of the language under analysis.”
—Noam Chomsky (b. 1928)
“All the facts of nature are nouns of the intellect, and make the grammar of the eternal language. Every word has a double, treble or centuple use and meaning.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)