In the Land of Invented Languages - Arika Okrent [61]
Despite his credentials, Weilgart could not get anyone to listen to him. His self-published books were full of bizarre line drawings, poems, and mystic philosophizing. Weilgart's bewildered colleagues at Luther tolerated him in their polite Lutheran way, while the administration pushed him to the margins as much as they could. He was asked not to peddle his books on campus, so some summers he left his family behind and toured across the country in a van, a prophet of the cosmos, stopping people on the street to tell them about aUI. He wrote to everyone he could think of, trying to drum up support for his project—Kurt Waldheim, B. F. Skinner, Pearl Buck, Albert Schweitzer, Noam Chomsky, the Shah of Iran. He asked Johnny Carson to make an announcement on his show. He asked Kurt Vonnegut to introduce aUI “in some of your stories … by letting e.g. a space-man speak in this language (I would be glad to translate any sentence into it).” In each case he molded his approach to what he thought the recipient might want to hear, often to embarrassing effect. He began his letter to Margaret Mead by appealing to her womanhood (“it takes a woman to teach the mother-tongue … I see you, dear Mrs. Mead, as prophetess of motherhood”), and his letter to Harry Belafonte describes aUI as a “language without prejudice” and dwells on the unfortunate sound associations of the word “niggardly.”
He wrote to some of the same people Bliss did, and at some point one of them must have informed Bliss about Weilgart's project. Bliss wrote to him immediately, but kept it polite. After all, here was a Doktor Doktor Professor who didn't dismiss the idea of a universal symbol language but rather embraced it. Perhaps he could convince Herr Professor to support Blissymbolics instead. Weilgart wrote back an equally polite letter, expressing admiration for Bliss's ideals but not saying much about his project beyond that he thought it was “a most interesting endeavor.” The rest of Weilgart's letter was a slyly aggressive description of his background—the illustrious relatives, the degrees he had received, his experience being diagnosed with an abnormally high IQ—every detail no doubt another knife twist in Bliss's fevered knot of insecurity.
Bliss received Weilgart's letter in April 1972, just before his first trip to Toronto. He was about to experience the peak of his career, and Weilgart, who wasn't being written about in Time magazine or anywhere else that Bliss knew of, soon seemed a much diminished threat. Bliss shifted his attention to other problems.
The Catastrophic Results
of Her Ignorance
Both Bliss and Weilgart claimed their languages expressed the fundamental truth about things. They also claimed that because they used “natural” symbolism—forms that looked like, or sounded like, the things they referred to—their languages were transparent, able to be universally understood. However, their ideas of what was “true” and what was “natural” were completely different.
For example, Bliss's symbol for water is Weilgart's symbol for sound. For Weilgart, water is not a primitive but a complex concept:
The explanation is that water is the liquid (jE, matter that “stands even, when at rest”) of greatest quantity.
For Bliss, sound is not a basic primitive but a complex concept, —an ear on top of the earth—that “indicates a vibration of air molecules.”
Weilgart's image of water refers to how it looks when it is level, and Bliss's refers to how it looks when it has waves in it. Bliss's image of sound refers to the organ that receives it, and Weilgart's refers to the “wave” physics of its transmission. Who has the truth? Whose representation is more “natural”?
If two men who come from the same place and speak the same language can't even