This shifting of the tenses is very natural and in many cases seems inevitable: "He told me that he was ill, but now he is all right." From these cases it is extended to cases in which it is not thus justified logically, but only psychologically: "I didn't know who he was." In Russian the rule is carried through that indirect speech uses the same tense as would have been used in direct speech: the sentence (1) quoted above would thus have been: He said that he is ill, and correspondingly in the other sentences. Now this rule was transferred by Z to Esp, and from Esp taken over into Ido, one of the reasons being probably that otherwise it would have been necessary to create a new tense for the shifted future in (3). English here uses the same form as in unreal conditional clauses, and the same is true of French, where "il disait qu'il écrirait le plus tôt possible" corresponds to "j'écrirai le plus tôt possible" of the direct speech, thus with the same form as the conditional "j'écrirais si je savais son adresse."
Now in Novial there is no necessity to follow the Russian rule, and we can easily form the shifted future missing in Esp-Ido, by adding -ed to the auxiliary sal: saled. The sentences given above are thus translated: