by Arika Okrent
He struggled on, giving lectures on Semantography to any organization that would have him, until Claire died of a heart attack in 1961. Charles was devastated. He no longer wanted to go on living. But “after 3 years of desolation,” he regained his “fighting spirit” and started working again, this time to vanquish the bureaucrats and university professors who, in his eyes, had murdered Claire with their apathy. He was also moved to action by the “tourist explosion.” Governmental bodies started looking for ways to standardize and improve symbols on road signs and in airports, and “academic busy-bodies ran to scientific foundations and asked for millions of dollars for research.” But they never mentioned Bliss’s work in their papers. So Charles changed the name of his system to Blissymbolics, so the “would-be plagiarists could not take over.”
Blissymbolics was in some ways a throwback to the seventeenth-century philosophical languages. Bliss broke down the world into essential elements of meaning and derived all other concepts through combination. But his symbols got their meaning not by referring back to a conceptual catalog (à la Wilkins) or a stanza and line of a memorized verse (à la Dalgarno) but by presenting a picture. Here are some of his basic symbol elements:
Bliss conveys more complex notions in a less direct manner—rain is not a drawing of rain, but a combination of “water” and “down”:
The basic symbol for water occurs in the symbols for all kinds of concepts having to do with liquid:
The combinations are not strictly pictorial, but there is a connection between the meaning of the symbol and the way it looks. Because of this connection, Bliss claims, “the simple, almost self-explanatory picturegraphs of Semantography can be read in any language.”
However, the further from the world of concrete objects Bliss gets, the more dubious this claim becomes. See if you can determine the meaning of the following combination:
Does it mean “depression,” sad because of negative thoughts? Or maybe something like “forced optimism,” when you feel unhappy and you mentally negate it? Or maybe it’s some kind of bad emotion that happens when you have run out of ideas? Giving up?
According to Bliss’s explanation, the meaning of the combination is “shame,” the feeling you get when you are “unhappy because your mind thinks no to what you have done.”
Well, sure. That’s one way to create a picturable image for “shame.” But it is not the only way. Another symbol-based language, aUI (the language of space), was developed by John Weilgart in the 1960s, at the same time Bliss was struggling to be heard. His word for “shame” was formed like this:
Weilgart’s image for “shame” is “toward-dark-feeling” because “a boy ashamed flees ‘into the dark’ to hide.” Both Bliss’s and Weilgart’s symbols for shame “look like” what they mean in some way, but there is nothing universal or self-explanatory about either one. The connection between form and meaning makes sense only after they have been explained (assuming a pretty broad reading of “makes sense”). There are many ways to symbolize an idea, and there are many ways to interpret the meaning of a symbol. Pictorial imagery, far from being a transparent, universal basis for communication, is a very, very unreliable way to get your message across.
Even the seventeenth-century language inventors understood this. Although they were developing “real” characters—symbols that would stand for ideas rather than words—they never considered making the characters look like the ideas they represented. Such an approach was considered primitive, unsuitable for abstract, logical thought. They had the example of Egyptian hieroglyphics, which had not yet been deciphered, to discourage them. Hieroglyphics were assumed to stand for the objects they looked like. All other meaning had to be inferred through complicated chains of association. A serpent with a tail in its mouth meant “year” because a year returns into itself. A viper represented a child who plots against its mother because vipers are born by eating their way out of their mothers' bellies. A viper with a stag, however, represented a man who moves fast but without thinking—like the stag would move when trying to get away. All this reading into things was exciting for a good number of mystical-minded types who were swept up in the Egyptology craze of the Renaissance, but not for men of science, like Wilkins. Hieroglyphics could only portray fuzzy religious, spiritual, and magical meaning; they were distinctly unsuited to the needs of a clear, rational language.
Of course, the seventeenth-century understanding of hieroglyphics was wrong. It wasn’t until the Rosetta stone was deciphered in 1822 that the nature of hieroglyphic writing was revealed. The figures did not represent vague, mystical concepts, but regular spoken words. The viper that showed up so often, and inspired all kinds of wrongheaded interpretations about the connotations of viperness, was nothing more than a symbol for the sound “f.”
The sound glyphs combine with meaning glyphs to indicate words. In the symbol for “to cry”—
—the first two symbols represent the sounds “r” and “m,” while the third symbol depicts an eye with lines coming down from it. Two pieces of partial information—the consonants in the word, and a pictorial approximation of its meaning—together indicate the full word, rem. There is no direct route from images to ideas here. Just a bunch of clues that converge on a word—not a concept, a word.
The Egyptian hieroglyphic system of writing died out, but what would have happened to it if it survived over many millennia? Probably this: The pronunciation of the spoken language would have changed, rendering the “sound” aspect of the glyphs harder to discern, and the imagery in the glyphs would have become more stylized and harder to recognize. The sound and meaning cues would have gotten weaker and less helpful. People would have had to resort more and more to just memorizing the glyphs. Imagine this scenario and what you end up with is Chinese writing.
Chinese writing does not operate on a pictographic principle, but Bliss, like a lot of people, became besotted with the idea that it did. He couldn’t really be blamed for this impression. The teacher he hired probably started him off with the most iconic characters, as most teachers do:
Then Bliss would have learned about the poetic ways in which characters combine to make compound characters:
In this simple introduction to Chinese writing, Bliss would have found the primary elements that inspired his own system—pictographic symbols that represented concepts, and a method for combining them to make other concepts.
But he would then start learning a lot of characters that didn’t look anything like what they meant, and a lot of compound characters that had no nice poetic explanation. So he would just have to memorize them, and the more characters he would learn, the harder they would be to remember. And so it makes sense that after a year of learning, he gave up.
But if he had been learning to speak Chinese as well as write it—if he hadn’t been so impressed that he could read out the characters in his own language—perhaps he would have gotten further. Pronouncing the characters in Chinese, rather than in his own language, would help him to see why the character for “clamp,” for example, is formed like this:
It takes this form not because it has some conceptual thing to do with horses but because it is pronounced mà—just as the word “horse” is (but with a different tone). The tree part of the character provides a vague semantic clue that is open to interpretation (clamps are used on wood?), but the horse part is a much more reliable pointer to “clamp” because it doesn’t take you on some roundabout journey of connotation to a concept. Instead, it sets you down on a nice straight path and gives you a little shove toward a word.
Unfortunately, the sound aspect of Chinese characters is not always so readily apparent. Thousands of years of language change coupled with a conservative writing tradition will do that. Look at English, after only a few hundred years of change, holding on to forms like “light” and “knee,” when the pronunciations that gave rise to those spellings are no longer used. The situation in Chinese writing is much worse.
Still, m
ost characters, more than 90 percent, give you some clue about the pronunciation of the word. You can’t depend on those clues entirely, but it makes the task of learning and remembering thousands of characters a little bit easier. Chinese writing doesn’t represent spoken language in the way that alphabetic writing does, but it still represents spoken language—just in a much more complicated way.
But what of the observation, marveled at since Westerners began reporting from the Far East in the sixteenth century, that character writing is understood throughout Asia? How can it be that people who speak completely different, non–mutually intelligible languages understand each other in character writing? The truth is, they don’t. At least not in the way you would imagine from the ever popular “characters transcend language and go straight to concepts” account.
The Chinese writing system is based on Mandarin Chinese. Other languages spoken in China, like Cantonese, are different but historically related—about as similar as French and Italian are. So what happens when a Cantonese speaker picks up a Mandarin newspaper? Does he just read it off into his own language? No. Essentially, he reads it in Mandarin. In order to become literate, he has had to learn the Mandarin way of marking grammatical distinctions and the Mandarin way of putting sentences together. He may not have learned the Mandarin way of pronouncing every word, but many of the Cantonese pronunciations are similar (as are the French jour and the Italian giorno), so the sound clues in the characters are sometimes helpful. However, they are much less helpful, so he has had to do a lot more brute memorization. This is why it has taken him a couple of years longer than a Mandarin speaker to become literate.
As for a Japanese speaker, he does not understand the Mandarin newspaper at all. His spoken language is about as similar to Mandarin as Hungarian is to English. However, for historical reasons, Japanese is partially written with Chinese characters (along with other characters that stand for sounds). So when a Japanese speaker sees a Mandarin newspaper, he may indeed be able to recognize a number of the characters, but that doesn’t mean he will be able to form anything more than a fuzzy guess at what it all means. The situation is comparable to a Hungarian speaker seeing the English sentence “I saw the information about the crime on television.” Because Hungarian makes use of the international loanwords informacio, krimi, and televizio, a speaker will recognize “information … crime … television,” and she might guess the meaning of the sentence correctly. However, she might make the same guess if the sentence says, “I took the information about the crime and hid it behind the television,” and in that case her guess would be quite off the mark. And anyway, her interpretation of “crime” is probably wrong to begin with, since krimi means not “crime” but “crime story” or “detective novel” in Hungarian. The best a Japanese speaker can do with a Chinese text is pull out a big jumble of words. And a lot of them will mean something slightly—or even totally—different from what they mean in the Chinese version.
No, Chinese characters do not offer a magical ride to the land of pure ideas. Just a f@!*% hard slog to the city of words.
The Spacemen Speak
After Bliss’s first visit to Toronto things started to look up for Blissymbolics. He now had a real, practical success story to add to his dossier. He commenced an aggressive letter-writing campaign that got him some major international press, including an article in Time magazine. People from all over the world began to contact the center in Ontario, looking for more information about its program. McNaughton and her team began to develop educational materials and a teacher training protocol, so that others could take advantage of this new communication tool.
The more successful the program became, the more Bliss complained about the way the teachers at the center were doing things. They didn’t draw the lines thick enough; the proportions were wrong; they used “fancy” terms like “nouns” and “verbs” (terms used by the evil grammar teachers, the torturers of his youth) to describe what he called “things” and “actions.” Every time McNaughton sent him materials to look over, he wrote back lengthy tirades about all the ways they had gotten his system wrong. He was outraged that in one of their textbooks, they showed his symbol for vegetable, , next to a picture of various vegetables, including tomatoes. They had totally misunderstood his system! This was the symbol for things you eat (mouth symbol) that grow underground! Tomatoes don’t grow underground! The symbol for those kinds of vegetables is this:!
Bliss failed to see that the ultimate goal of the program was to teach the children to express themselves in English. At first, the iconicity of the symbols was important. The children couldn’t read yet, so they needed a way to recognize a word. The teachers would introduce a new symbol by pointing out how it resembled the object it stood for or, in the case of more abstract symbols, by explaining its motivation. Then the symbol would be added to each child’s symbol board—a grid of squares, each containing a symbol, with the English word written underneath it. In interactions with others, the children would pick out a word by recognizing its symbol and pointing to it; the person they were talking to would understand it by reading the English below it. Over time, with the use and interaction by which we all come to understand the meaning of words, the imagery in the symbol would become less important, just a slight reminder of the word it stood for. The English word “vegetable” does cover tomatoes. And for the children using it, was just a nonalphabetic way to get to that word.
The teachers did the best they could to accommodate Bliss’s criticisms. But his objectives were completely at odds with the practical problems they had to face. When the teachers encouraged the children to remember the symbol for “food,” by picturing it as a plate with a spoon under it, he was livid. It was crucial to his system that it be understood as the “mouth” above the “earth” because the true meaning (according to his “logical” system) was “all food which our mouth takes from Mother Earth.” When one of their newsletters showed a symbol sentence meaning “The Toronto Maple Leafs beat the Pittsburgh Penguins,” he lamented, “All in spite of my condemnation of competitive sport in my book!” When they used the combination “food + out” to mean “picnic,” he proclaimed, “FALSE!” It did not mean “picnic”; it meant “food out at a restaurant.” When they wrote to him to request symbols for words they needed, he rarely responded. But he criticized without fail when they came up with something themselves.
He had created a “universal” language that nobody else could figure out how to use.
The staff’s plan to keep Bliss away from the administration didn’t last very long. He wrote to the principal, to the doctors, to the minister of health. He complained about the ways in which his symbols were being abused, and he started to demand some of the money he was convinced was pouring in from all sides.
He would come back to visit every spring, bearing gifts and kisses for everyone, and fervent apologies for those who had received some of his harsher letters. Then he would go back to Australia and start in again. Why hadn’t anyone acknowledged his gifts? Didn’t they realize how much he had spent on them? Didn’t they realize he barely earned enough to afford the canned peas, mincemeat, and small pinch of beetroot he subsisted on day by day? Did they ever think about that while they collected the fat salaries they earned off the sweat of his life’s work?
In fact, they were struggling to attract resources and support for their program. They needed to convince granting agencies and government officials of the value of this new and experimental teaching method. Shirley was on one side arguing against those who thought needs-based pictures (a toilet, a cup, a sandwich) were “good enough” and on the other side arguing against those who thought they should just start off by teaching the kids to spell. Meanwhile, Charles was traveling around Canada dismantling any progress they had made. He gave public lectures that were nothing more than point-by-point critiques of all their “mistakes.” He badgered government officials to convince the OCCC teachers to stop damaging the children by using his syst
em incorrectly (at one point he ambushed the Ontario minister of education outside his home). In Bliss’s mind, he was helping the center to do a better job, and he expected them to be grateful.
So it was a surprise to him when, on his 1974 visit, the director of the OCCC called Bliss into his office and told him never to come back. They had had enough. In another room, on another floor, an Australian and Canadian film crew was setting up to record a scene for a documentary they were making about Bliss. Shirley went up to get him. He was shaken, coughing nervously, but he said nothing about what had just happened. He drank a glass of water and, in the time it took them to walk downstairs, transformed himself back into the jolly, hopping firecracker that he always seemed to be in front of an audience. He went ahead and performed for the camera and the children, grabbing a globe to demonstrate how far away Australia was. When I first watched the film, Mr. Symbol Man, I didn’t notice anything different about him in the scene. But after hearing the story from Shirley, I went back and watched it again. After he puts down the globe, he sits off to the side as Kari dictates a letter to her teacher through her symbol board. He seems uncharacteristically subdued, and a little confused. His face is drained of animation and painfully vulnerable. A few scenes later he is back in Australia, sitting at his desk, smiling and throwing his hands up in dramatic exasperation. “People don’t listen to me! They look right through me! What should I do? What should I do?” Then he turns away with a desperate, high-pitched laugh that’s almost too much to bear.
At one point, Bliss was invited to give a lecture at a hospital in Sydney. Afterward, he fumed that only nurses had shown up. “Not one doctor!” he complained. He threatened to cancel an upcoming lecture at another hospital unless the organizers could guarantee that full, high-ranking medical doctors would be there. Instead, they canceled on him. Despite the documentary, the lecture invitations, the reporters knocking on his door, he felt ignored, disrespected. He was getting the attention of nurses, social workers, and teachers, when he wanted doctors, professors, and heads of state.