Charles Bliss: Blissymbolics
Charles Bliss (1897-1985) was born Karl Blitz in Austro-Hungria. Experiences of linguistic rivalry, the Second World War (including a spell in Dachau concentration camp) and travel in the Far East convinced him of the need for an internationally comprehensible system of symbols which could be used universally and would lead to a reduction in tension between speech communities. Bliss’s proposals for such a system were originally published privately in 1949 in a volume entitled International Semantography (Bliss, 1949), but it was not until the 1970s that the system began to be used, particularly for people with learning disabilities in Canada (Helfman, 1981).
The Bliss system, known today as Blissymbolics, is, in its essence, the direct descendant of Wilkins’ ‘real character’ in that meaning may be ascertained without the mediation of phonemically-based writing. It has certain advantages, however, in that the symbols are ‘iconic’ and motivated, i.e. they resemble that to which they refer, and the more complex ones are composed of ‘semantic primes’ which are either superimposed one on another or concatenated on a line. The first symbol combines the basic sign for person, and the number 1 to indicate ‘first’, so ‘first person’ = T. the second symbol combines the heart, the basic symbol used for feelings, with a wavy line representing ‘fire’, and together this means ‘desire’. The inverted ‘v’ indicates that this is a verb, so this is the verb ‘want’. The leg symbol implies ‘walk’, ‘go’ (based directly on an Egyptian hieroglyph) and, again, the inverted ‘v’ means that this is a verb: ‘to go’. The fourth symbol combines ‘house’, ‘camera’ and ‘forward’, hence ‘the house where the camera projects’, i.e., ‘the cinema.’
The sentence thus reads, ‘1 want to go to the cinema.’ While this example may seem simplistic, it is possible to express extremely complex and abstract notions in Blissymbolics such as ‘immortality’, ‘moral’, ‘promise’, ‘specific’, ‘structure’, ‘thoughtful’ and ‘watchful’, to take but a few notions at random from the Reference Guide to Blissymbolics (Wood, Storr, & Reich, 1992). Since early work on cognates on the 1980s (Maun, 1986; Pons-Ridler, 1984), the use of these transparent words has established itself firmly in the orthodoxy of modern FL teaching in England e.g., in GCSE specifications and in the Frameworks for teaching languages used at Key Stage 2 (ages 7-11) and Key Stage 3 (ages 12-14). The problem for L2 vocabulary learning, however, lies not with cognates, but with those words which are not cognate, or, worse, are faux amis. Given that much common French vocabulary is not cognate with English, opaque notions such as ‘je’, ‘vouloir’ and ‘aller’ (as in, Je veux alter au cinema) could be conveyed to English-speaking readers if they were first introduced to Blissymbolics, and their development in this system then ran in parallel with their development in the L2. Thus, where parallel texts or glosses in the past used English, the use of a symbolic system such as Blissymbolics removes the need for the learner to work with the medium of their LI – the meaning of the French becomes apparent from the meaning of the symbols. The text is scaffolded without the interference of the LI.
Moreover, once learned, Blissymbolics might be used to learn almost any European language. In a recent informal experiment at the University of Exeter, language students studying for the Post-Graduate Certificate in Education (PGCE) learnt some basic Bliss symbols, which knowledge they then applied to two texts from Teach Yourself Irish (i.e., Gaelic), annotated with Bliss symbols. Within an hour of starting instruction on the system, they were able to give the Irish for individual lexical items, obtain the gist of the texts, and sometimes give their exact sense.
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