
Blissymbols - polm23
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blissymbols
======
senkora
I think it was In the Land of Invented Languages that had a great discussion
of Blissymbols and how it failed.

In short, these systems work fine for concrete vocabulary but completely fail
for complex language, because language is too abstract. The Blissymbols for
abstract words are somewhat suggestive but still must be learned individually,
which is the whole thing he was trying to avoid.

[http://inthelandofinventedlanguages.com/](http://inthelandofinventedlanguages.com/)

~~~
7thaccount
Can confirm. In Arika Okrent's excellent book that also covers Klingon,
Esperanto, and Lojbahn among others.

My favorite part is that the inventor was supposedly a total jerk to the nurse
that was in charge of the program using the symbols, but she still took care
of him later in life.

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roenxi
The problem with ideograms is what happens when things go wrong.

There are a lot of people out there who are barely literate; although for
obvious reasons probably not so many of them make it to HN. If someone don't
know how to spell and needs to communicate in a latin script they have a
couple of chances. Sounding things out, guessing at spellings for words that
have only been heard, etc.

The idea is interesting and worth exploring; but ultimately I'd worry that it
will be exclusionary and hard to work with for people who don't do much
written communicating.

~~~
andykx
It seems like everything you said is true of current written languages. If you
don’t know how to read/write it, you won’t understand it. I feel that this
writing system is best used to facilitate inter-cultural communication, as
opposed to making it easier for people to read/write.

Humans are quite good at optimizing language without even thinking about it.
This is a fact that almost all conlangs ignore. They are a fun mental exercise
for linguists, but will ultimately never see any serious usage.

~~~
gwbas1c
> I feel that this writing system is best used to facilitate inter-cultural
> communication

This happens in China

When I used to spend time with a Mandarin speaker, he explained to me that
written Chinese is the same throughout the country, but the dialects are often
so different that they can't understand each other.

It would be as if all romance languages were written the same way, so that
written Italian, Spanish, French, ect, were the same.

~~~
louai
This is exactly how Arabic works today. It's a huge impediment, not a benefit.

~~~
niels_bom
Can you please elaborate on why it’s an impediment?

~~~
oska
Because this way no-one has written forms of their mother tongue. They have to
learn a second language and its written form. As others are pointing out, the
situation is pretty much equivalent to Europe 1000 years ago when Latin had
evolved into separate languages but all writing was still done in Latin. What
would you prefer: being able to speak and write in French or speak in French
but have to learn Latin to be able to write?

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thesuperbigfrog
The Radio Lab episode about Charles Bliss is very good and explains a lot
about the history and life of the man who created Blissymbols:

[https://www.wnycstudios.org/podcasts/radiolab/articles/bliss](https://www.wnycstudios.org/podcasts/radiolab/articles/bliss)

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stdbrouw
For those into this kind of thing, Arika Okrent's "In the Land of Invented
Languages: Esperanto Rock Stars, Klingon Poets, Loglan Lovers, and the Mad
Dreamers Who Tried to Build A Perfect Language" has a chapter on Blissymbols
and is just about the best non-fiction book I've ever read.

~~~
senkora
We both commented about the same book within a minute of each other. I second
this, it’s an amazing read.

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ianbicking
This make me think of an alphabetic form of Chinese characters: semantic
symbols, but decomposable (which I suppose those characters are in a sense).

~~~
schoen
Charles Bliss was directly inspired by Chinese characters. (He didn't
understand exactly how they worked but he was greatly impressed by them. In
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19092643](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19092643)
and
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23411941](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23411941),
I mentioned that Bliss, in an unusual case, learned to read Chinese without
speaking it.)

~~~
082349872349872
Now I'm wondering: how often can japanese read chinese without speaking it?

~~~
coopierez
This sort of thing happens in a lot of languages though. Your average Italian
can comprehend a decent amount of French text without being able to keep up in
conversation, or even speak the language. Same with Dutch and German.

~~~
jhbadger
True, but what is unusual about the Chinese/Japanese connection is that these
languages aren't related linguistically -- they just share (partly) a writing
system. The Romance languages all descend from Latin, and the Germanic
languages likewise have a common ancestor. So it's not surprising to find
similarities there.

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seesawtron
Aren't modern emojis more interpretable than these blissymbols? Sure they are
harder to create on pen and paper but on a digital platform, an illiterate
person can still use them easily. Although the modern emojis are limited to
"reactions" and not "intended actions" (unlike blissymbols) but this might
change in the next years.

~~~
majewsky
Emoji might have a decently-sized (though still incredibly limited)
vocabulary, but there is no widely-agreed-upon grammar. You could say "man"
with the man emoji or "book" with the book emoji, but how do you say "the
man's book"? Just the man emoji followed by the book emoji? Wouldn't that be
something like "the man reads"?

~~~
nicoburns
It could be interesting to create relational symbols to connect emoji

~~~
majewsky
A good place to start could be Japanese grammar which relies heavily on
relational markers (so-called "particles"). It would also be appropriate since
Emoji originate in Japan.

For example, to express something like "I went to the grocery store
yesterday", the corresponding Japanese sentence would be structured like this:
"I <topic-marker> grocery store <destination-marker> yesterday <time-marker>
go-<past-tense-suffix>".

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strogonoff
A concept in some ways similar (in not being phonetic, for example), but
arguably more interesting due to its non-linearity, is Unker writing system:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23412776](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23412776)

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jedimastert
> on the premise that “interlinguistic communication is mainly carried on by
> reading and writing”.

I'm betting this person vastly underestimated the number of pidgins and
creoles that have popped up ad-hoc in random places in the world.

~~~
jasode
_> this person vastly underestimated the number of pidgins and creoles that
have popped up ad-hoc_

The key adjective that you quoted is _" interlinguistic"_ which is a _planned_
language for _international communication_. From the wikipedia page[1]:

 _> Interlinguistics, as the science of planned languages, has existed for
more than a century as a specific branch of linguistics[1] for the study of
various aspects of linguistic communication. Interlinguistics is a discipline
formalized by Otto Jespersen in 1931 as the science of interlanguages, i.e.
contact languages tailored for international communication. _

As you said, pidgins & creoles are unplanned/organic/adhoc -- so they're not
deliberately interlinguistic.

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interlinguistics](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interlinguistics)

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mattpavelle
There was a nice Radiolab podcast about this:
[https://www.wnycstudios.org/podcasts/radiolab/segments/25719...](https://www.wnycstudios.org/podcasts/radiolab/segments/257194-man-
became-bliss)

And also another podcast from NPR:
[https://www.wnycstudios.org/podcasts/notetoself/articles/cha...](https://www.wnycstudios.org/podcasts/notetoself/articles/charles-
bliss-emoji)

I found the Radiolab one entertaining.

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7373737373
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_semantic_metalanguage](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_semantic_metalanguage)

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gverrilla
this is fan fiction

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nephrite
Typical [https://xkcd.com/927/](https://xkcd.com/927/)

