In the Land of Invented Languages - Arika Okrent [56]
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