In the Land of Invented Languages - Arika Okrent [60]
He was lucky to be getting any attention at all. Blissymbolics was not the only pictorial symbol language to emerge after World War II. There was Karl Janson's Picto (1957) and John Williams's Pikto (1959) and Andreas Eckardt's Safo (1962). No one was using those languages for anything.
Bliss had come to adulthood in interwar Austria, where a man was nothing without a title. He longed to inspire the same awed respect in others that he had felt when, as a poor, provincial nobody, he encountered the Herr Doktors, Herr Ingenieurs, and Herr Doktor Doktor Professors of Vienna. He thought people didn't listen to him because he lacked the right titles, and so he never ceased trying to get those titles. He wrote to every university in Australia, asking to be granted a professorship, or at least a Ph.D., on the basis of his success with the Toronto program, but none responded. (He did finally purchase a mail-order Ph.D., shortly before his death.)
The titles wouldn't have done him any good. While Bliss was traveling around giving interviews and lectures (“nurses'” lectures though they may have been), one Doktor Doktor Professor John Wolfgang Weilgart was unsuccessfully trying to get someone, anyone, to pay attention to his universal language.
Weilgart was a professor of psychology (at Luther College, in Iowa) with two Ph.D.'s when he first published his aUI: The Language of Space, in 1968. Weilgart was also from Austria, but had grown up in much more elevated circumstances than Bliss had. His grandfather was a Hungarian nobleman of some sort. His father, Hofrat Professor Doktor Doktor Arpad Weixlgärtner, was the director of the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna. His uncle Richard Neutra was a famous architect. They lived in Schoenburg Palace for a time. They socialized with Freud and other luminaries of turn-of-the-century Vienna.
As a boy, Weilgart had visions of winged beings who came from the stars to deliver a message of peace. When he told his parents about his visions, they took him to a psychiatrist, who diagnosed nothing more than a high IQ but warned him that he should speak about such visions only as “dreams” or “poems.” Since he seemed to be obsessed with words and sounds and meaning, his father encouraged him to get a degree in languages and philology, which he did, completing his dissertation a few months before the outbreak of World War II. He spent the war in the United States, teaching German, Spanish, Latin, and French at various schools and colleges in Oregon, California, and Louisiana. After the war, he returned to Europe and got another degree, in psychology.
He began teaching at Luther in 1964, where he completed his book on aUI. It begins with a poem about a boy who is visited by a kindly “Spaceman.” The Spaceman wants to transmit the wisdom of his beings to the people of Earth, but cannot do it through the languages of Earth, because “if we learnt your millions of words, we would be infected by your warped way of thinking.” So he teaches the boy the language of space.
In aUI, all concepts are derived from a set of thirty-three basic elements that have not only a motivated pictorial representation but a motivated sound representation.
The word aUI is formed by combining “space” (a), “mind” (U), and “sound” (I) and means “the language of space” because language is “when your mind sounds off.”
Weilgart's aUI was supposed to serve as a neutral international language, and a cure for diseases of the mind caused by language. Weilgart claimed it was a language of cosmic truth that could bring about peace, dissolve selfishness, and align the conscious and subconscious mind. He developed a psychotherapy technique where he had patients translate words into aUI, in