As I don’t count myself as a particularly great lyricist, and such widely known lyrics already existed, I felt it would be wrong to start from scratch. Obviously the words would have to scan well when read or sung, but after a while I also realised that the original German rhymed. In fact, the first I noticed was when the Ido started to rhyme almost by accident, which isn’t so difficult, I admit, when all nouns have the same ending. I think Schiller had a similar advantage in German as there are lots of nouns with the suffix “-en” and verbs which use that ending in a conjugation. My big problem, with Schiller’s words, however, is their divisive and seemingly self-contradictory theology. On the one hand there are terms like “Elysium”, “magic” and “gods” (in one possible translation of the German) and on the other hand, ideas like “the cherub stands before God”, “Do you sense the Creator, world?” and “Brothers, beyond the star-canopy must a loving Father dwell.” Perhaps the relative location of these ideas is trying to paint a bigger picture, but at first glance the words could not be sung sincerely by anyone with any internally consistent theology of which I am aware.
So, given a desire to specifically deal with the theology of the words, the question became “What is the correct (amount of) theology to put in?” Fortunately, there was a way of answering this question, namely the Treaty establishing a Constitution for Europe, a treaty which never entered into effect, but which included a reference in its preamble to “the cultural, religious and humanist inheritance of Europe”. This is the nearest thing the EU has to a collective view on the importance of religion, and it is a delicately reached balance. I think that is a fine example of Europe fulfilling its motto of “United in diversity”. Turning a religious or mystical song into one which captures the culture, religions and humanism is still no easy task, but as I hope to explain, the good parts of all three of these have sufficient principles in common to allow (possibly rather ambiguous) words similar in meaning to those of Schiller.
But why stop there? One of the great strengths of Ido, which shouldn’t be overlooked in an undertaking like this, is its neutrality towards gender. Not only does it not enforce gender on arbitrary nouns, but it allows for a masculine, feminine, or unspecified-gender version of each noun. For instance there are the words “doktoro”, “doktorulo” and “doktorino” for “doctor”, “male doctor” and “female doctor” respectively. There are some points in the lyrics where words are used which suggest a male or female person or characteristic. If anyone wants the lyrics to be more precise about which gender is involved, they can do so in their own heart without, I hope, betraying their beliefs by singing these words. In the next post I will point out other ways that the language allows for as much or as little ambiguity as required.
Until then, ponder this: Once we have wearable computers, head-mounted displays, real-time text and speech recognition, and accurate translation, what’s to stop people relying on subtitles when they go to a country where signs and speech is in a foreign language? What about growing up in world where no country speaks your mother (and father) tongue?
