There were already many types of constructed languages during de Wahl's time. Some of them, like Esperanto and Ido, were called "schematic" because they followed their own design. Others, like Latino sine flexione and Idiom Neutral, were called "naturalistic" because they tried to look like natural languages. The difficulty was that creators had to choose between being regular or looking natural. Louis Couturat, the creator of Ido, wrote the same thing in 1903, and called it a paradox: "The international words are not regular, and the regular words are not international." The language that de Wahl made was meant to be a language that was both regular and international at the same time.