In the Land of Invented Languages - Arika Okrent [58]
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