In the Land of Invented Languages - Arika Okrent [55]
There was no response. Despite having lived through the horrors of the Nazis and the privations of refugee life in Shanghai, Charles would refer to the time after the publication of Semantography as their years of despair. He got a job as a spot welder in an automobile factory and worked on his symbols by night. His efforts to gain recognition became larger and more desperate. When he heard that a prominent American educator was coming to Sydney on a lecture tour, he went to the airport and managed to push his way into the man's taxi, where he spent the whole ride to the hotel firing off a sales pitch.
And when the philosopher Bertrand Russell came to town, Bliss somehow managed to wangle an audience with him. These kinds of actions did not endear Bliss to the public officials who sponsored lecture tours, but sometimes they did get him results. Russell wrote him a polite letter of endorsement (which Bliss quoted, or reproduced in full, in everything he ever subsequently published), and Bliss got his name, and his system, into the local papers.
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),