Creator

Rev. Edward Powell Foster was born October 5, 1853, in Bloom Furnace, Ohio. He lived in his later years in Waverly, West Virginia. Foster died in Marietta, Ohio, on July 17, 1937, and is buried in Riverview Cemetery in Williamstown, West Virginia.  Foster held ministerial positions and professorships at various locations in Kansas, Missouri, Cincinnati, and Marietta, and also studied at the Universities of Berlin and Leipzig. The Marietta (College) Alumnus magazine, in Foster's obituary from 1937, cites an article Foster wrote "ten years ago" where he talked about his work with Ro.

Characteristics

In Ro, words are constructed using a category system. For example, all words starting with "bofo-" signify colors; the word for red is "bofoc", and yellow is "bofof". Foster did not simply try to design a better language in general, but to optimize his language for one design criterion: recognizability of unknown words. Foster wrote about Ro:

Ro did not begin with attempting to rival or supplant any other language whatever, either natural or artificial, nor was it suggested by any of them. Unexpectedly came the thought: "How strange it is that there is nothing in the appearance of a written or printed word that gives the slightest hint of its meaning. Why should a word not be a picture? A new word, never seen before would then, like a painting seen for the first time, convey at least some of the meaning to the eye."

After working on the language for about two years, Foster published the first booklet about Ro in 1906. The publication of Ro periodicals was supported by several American sponsors, especially from the Marietta, Ohio area, including Melvil Dewey, inventor of the Dewey Decimal Classification (another attempt to categorize human knowledge), Vice President Charles G. Dawes, George White, who mentioned Ro in the Congressional Record,^[6][7] and Alice Vanderbilt Morris of IALA.  Several more books about Ro by Foster and his wife appeared over the years, as late as 1932. The entirety of George White's mention of Ro in the Congressional Record reads: "By Mr. WHITE (by request) : Resolution (H. Res. 432) providing for an investigation of a new language known as Ro ; to the Committee on Education."