New Kanjis for the Rest of Us

I’ve often thought over the years of coming up with a new ideographic written language. Now I find a man named Charles K. Bliss has already done this, creating something called Blissymbols (or “Semantography”).

One useful-looking book is Heffman’s Biosymbolics: Speaking without Speech, which talks about using Blissymbols to help handicapped children to communicate.

For more information, visit Douglas Crockford’s site (Blisssymbolics link is on the left). (You may also want to check out his amazing materials on Javascript, of which he is doubtless the most advanced practitioner in the world.)

TODO: Check out languages mentioned by Umberto Eco in his book The Search for the Perfect Language.

There have been any number of proposals for visual alphabets, some quite recent. We might cite Bliss’s Semantography, Eckhaardt’s Safo, Janson’s Picto and Ota’s Locos Yet, as Noth has observed, these are all cases of pasigraphy (which we will discuss in a later chapter) rather than true languages. Besides, they are based on natural languages. Many, moreover, are mere lexical codes without any grammatical component (p. 175).

Crockford comments that semantography (Blissymbolics) does not belong to the class of visual alphabets that Eco is dismissing.

One Response to “New Kanjis for the Rest of Us”

  1. bliss Says:

    Website of Blissymbolics Communication International…check it out!

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