In the Land of Invented Languages - Arika Okrent [66]
Bliss spent the money on a big publication run of his own Blissymbols teaching manual. It is the sharpest looking of all his publications—a bright red hard-vinyl cover over 564 high-quality card-stock pages held together in a two-ring binder. It is professionally illustrated, and all the symbols are drawn to his specifications. The content, however, is the same old classic Bliss—blustery and preposterous. Here is how he advises teaching the symbol for steam:
Put a saucepan or a kettle on the stove and when the steam comes out let your handicapped child put its finger near the steam. Of course, it will get slightly burned, but it will be a lesson for life what steam really is and why it is the opposite of rain, which is usually rather cold or slightly warm.
Most of the books were destroyed in a fire after Bliss died in 1985. Douglas Everingham, a local Sydney doctor and politician, was named one of the executors of what was left. Everingham, himself interested in the international language cause, had been an early supporter of Bliss's work and had done what he could in the 1970s, during his term as national minister of health, to promote Blissymbolics (at great risk to his own reputation). Bliss, of course, thought Everingham didn't try hard enough and once showed up at a public rally where he was campaigning for re-election and heckled him, crying, “Down with Everingham!” and worse.
Everingham told me by e-mail that he still thought kindly of Bliss, and encouraged me to be charitable toward him as well. He reminded me that Bliss was a Holocaust survivor, a refugee, an immigrant; Bliss had seen terrible things, and he really did believe he had invented a solution, a way to ensure those things would never happen again.
But, in looking through Bliss's writings, I found that he did have his moments of doubt. Buried in one of his books, in a rant about psychologists and how they are always trying to read into things, is the following passage:
Take Bliss, the author of this book. He thinks that his work is motivated by his conscience, that he slaves for humanity. But it may be only a craving for the limelight of public acclaim. He rises in defence of the children of mankind (so he thinks) when he attacks the teachers. But it may be only envy and enmity and rage about their rejection of his work (which they didn't even bother to examine).
He thinks his invention will revolutionize the 21st century. The hell it will! The teachers will be adamant. So he cries, “To dream the impossible dream, to beat the unbeatable foe, etc., etc.” feeling himself a pioneer and martyr rolled in one.
Well, what motivates him really?
He stops there.
The Whorfian
Hypothesis
Blissymbolics and aUI and the few other pictographic languages of the post-Esperanto era hardly constituted a movement, but they did reflect a widespread popular preoccupation with, as the title of one 1938 best seller called it, “the tyranny of words.” Both Bliss and Weilgart advertised their projects not just as a way for people of different language backgrounds to communicate with each other but as a way to uncover the truths that our natural languages hid or distorted. They worked on the assumption that language warped the mind, and that assumption was not just some crazy outsider philosophy. It was very much a part of the general intellectual climate from the 1930s to the 1950s, when Bliss and Weilgart were developing their systems.
Of course, the Nazi and Soviet propaganda machines provided dramatic evidence for the pernicious power of language, but the “tyranny of words” idea went beyond the claim that bad people sometimes used language to bad ends. It suggested that all of us, every day, were being misled, not by lies told by others, but by our own habits of thinking, as