Novial/AIL After Ido

After Ido

It is impossible for me in this short survey to name all those who have worked during the last decades at the problem of an interlanguage; let me mention only the following names, chosen perhaps a little arbitrarily: Barral, Borgius, Michaux, Petrashevich, Talmey, Weisbart. Some of them have started from Ido, others have been more or less independent of it; none of them has worked out a language in all details, but none of them is without some good idea here and there - some of these have found their way into my own scheme, though in some cases I had come upon the same thought before knowing that it had been anticipated.

A few lines must here be given to M. René de Saussure ("Antido"), who with a rare assiduity and seriousness has combated Couturat's principles of word-formation and at the same time, through shifting and modifying now one, now another ending, produced successively five or six different "languages," which might easily be mistaken for caricatures of Esperanto, if their author had not seized every opportunity of expressing his deep veneration for Zamenhof's genius.