Ido

The actual flag of Ido.

Ido is a language designed by two French linguists who had studied Esperanto, deliberated on its advantages and disadvantages for a very long time and concluded that it was not French enough. Today about three and a half people speak Ido however most Idists will try to tell you otherwise but in reality nobody speaks ido except for like three and a half people

History

In 1907 Louis Couturat and Louis de Beaufront were watching a linguistic fashion show in Paris, smoking cigarettes out of cigarette holders so they would not catch their finely-sculpted facial hair on fire and potentially burn their berets, drinking fine wine from a country vineyard, spreading a perfectly-paired cheese onto slices of baguette and sneering at Americans who kept wandering in to ask for directions to Buckingham Palace. As they watched a model walk down the catwalk and utter the words "Esperanto estas internacia lingvo por ĉiuj!", they suddenly had a thought: "The Esperanto, this is good but not like our language."

Immediately after having this thought, the Frenchmen went home and had furious anal sex, as it was illegal for them to do any work at night. The following morning, they set their minds to the diligent task of creating Ido for exactly 35 hours every week. In order to give it maximum authenticity they set up a viral marketing campaign that involved a fake committee designed to select an international language, getting help from the Esperanto community by saying the fake committee was designed to select Esperanto. At the last moment, Ido was rolled out instead of Esperanto to thunderous applause among its target market of fashionable cosmopolitan dickheads.

Decline

Although the people who had followed the crowd from Volapük to Esperanto couldn't wait to try out the latest designer linguistic craze, Ido ultimately was trumped by Occidental. By the time Interlingua came along to trump Occidental, Lord of the Rings had already proven that even the British could make conlangs, and the French declared them passé. No one would care about conlangs again until the 2000s when the French themselves had become passé, at which point Peter Jackson singlehandedly made British fantasy novels fashionable.

Grammar

Ido has many more suffixes than Esperanto, three types of infinitives, more tenses and one fewer case. This results in speakers of Ido being able to discuss everything they could already discuss in Esperanto, but with more effort.

Sample

Ido

English

Mea intuico dicas a me ke existas ruzoza komploto kontre nia linguo, o forsan nula komploto existas e simple omno eventis tale pro maxim neefikiva (unesme me skribis altra adjektivo...) agado. Forsan mea stulteso igas me imaginar falsaji... Irgakaze me jus efacis la antea kritikema artiklo e me ne plus opinionos publike pri ta eventi desfortunoza e lamentinda.

My intuition tells me that there is a cunning conspiracy against our language, or maybe there is no conspiracy and everything has simply happened this way due to the most ineffective (at first I wrote a different adjective...) possible actions. Maybe my foolishness causes me to imagine falsehoods... Either way I just erased the previous critical article and will no longer publicly talk about these unfortunate and regrettable events.

Literature and publications

There is an enormous amount of erotic fiction written in Ido, allowing frustrated speakers to live in a world where sexy people have sex in their language. Although the Ido community has a surprising amount of gender diversity for a community of three and a half people, most of them do not actually like each other that much, leading to adepts eventually leaving Ido and learning something spoken by even fewer people.

There is also an Uncyclopedia in Ido which consists almost entirely of articles by chav spambots.

International Ido conventions

Whenever two or more Ido speakers from different countries meet, this is considered an international Ido convention as well as a quorum. This happens very rarely.