In the Land of Invented Languages - Arika Okrent [51]
It was an incredibly slow and frustrating way to have a conversation. Often, I missed her eye signal—a random jerk of her body could make me think she had signaled when she hadn't—and I had to back up and check that I had the right section or column. Also, she refused to let me finish a sentence for her, even when it was completely clear where she was headed. And Ann didn't take any shortcuts. Her sentences were complete and grammatically correct—when she wanted to say “told,” she didn't just lead me to “tell,” but to “tell” and to an entry indicating past tense. When she wanted a name or a word that wasn't on her chart, she directed me to a section that had the alphabet arranged on a grid, and she spelled the whole thing out, letter by letter, even when I guessed the word correctly. She made no concessions to convenience.
To my convenience, that is. Her whole life was inconvenience, and she was accustomed to it. She depended on others to feed her, to dress her, to put her to bed at night and get her out of bed in the morning. She had no control over anything having to do with her body. But she did have control over her mind, and in her use of language she could prove it. She was not going to leave it up to me, and my convenience, to guess at a good enough approximation of her intentions. She had the ability, as difficult and time-consuming as it was, to say what she wanted to say, in exactly the way she wanted to say it, an ability that most of us take for granted. Ann had known what it was like not to have that ability, and she was never going to take it for granted.
I had come to Toronto to find out more about Blissymbolics, a pictorial symbol language invented by Charles Bliss in the 1940s. I had found a copy of his 1949 book about his system in a used bookstore in Washington, D.C. It was full of rambling Utopian philosophy and naive scientific theories (complete with references to Reader's articles). I was delighted to add it to my collection of nutty universal language schemes that I considered myself to be single-handedly rescuing from obscurity. Upon further investigation, however, I found out that Blissymbolics was not as obscure as I thought it was. There was a school in Canada for children with cerebral palsy that was actually using it for communication. But what, exactly, were they doing with it? How could a language as crazy as this one be useful for anything?
Ann was a graduate of the program at the Ontario Crippled Children's Centre (now called Bloorview Kids Rehab) that had started using Blissymbolics in the 1970s. But like all the other program graduates I visited on that trip, she now interacted through English text. All of the students I met with talked about the way Blissymbols had changed their lives. Ann said Bliss had “opened a door to my mind.” But none of them used the language anymore. Why, I wondered, hadn't they just started with English, a language they could hear and understand, rather than spend their time learning this bizarre symbol language? I thought about Stephen Hawking, who communicates in a manner similar to Ann's (his computer pages through the word choices for him, and he clicks a device with his hand when it arrives at the word he wants). He never had anything to do with Blissymbols and gets along just fine.
I mentioned this, delicately, to Shirley McNaughton, the teacher who had started the Blissymbol program. “Oh,” she said, “but Stephen Hawking was an adult when he lost the ability to speak.” He has ALS, a degenerative neurological disorder. “He already knew how to use English to express himself. He already knew how to read. Ann was five or six when we started with her. What good is English text to a child who can't read yet? And if a child can't speak and can't move, how do you teach them to read? How do you know what they know, what they understand?”
McNaughton didn't know anything about children with dis-abilities