Blissymbols
| Blissymbols |
|
|---|---|
| Type | |
| Languages | Blissymbols |
|
Time period
|
1949 to the present |
| Direction | Varies |
| ISO 15924 | Blis, 550 |
| Blissymbols | |
|---|---|
| Created by | Charles K. Bliss |
| Date | 1949 |
| Setting and usage | Augmentative and Alternative Communication |
| Purpose |
constructed language
|
| Sources | Ideographic written language |
| Official status | |
| Regulated by | Blissymbolics Communication International |
| Language codes | |
| ISO 639-2 | zbl |
| ISO 639-3 | |
|
Linguist list
|
zbl |
| Glottolog | None |
Blissymbols or Blissymbolics was conceived as an ideographic writing system called Semantography consisting of several hundred basic symbols, each representing a concept, which can be composed together to generate new symbols that represent new concepts. Blissymbols differ from most of the world's major writing systems in that the characters do not correspond at all to the sounds of any spoken language.
Blissymbols was invented by Charles K. Bliss (1897–1985), born Karl Kasiel Blitz in the Austro-Hungarian city of Czernowitz (at present the Ukrainian city of Chernivtsi), which had a mixture of different nationalities that “hated each other, mainly because they spoke and thought in different languages.” Bliss graduated as a chemical engineer at the Vienna University of Technology, and joined an electronics company as a research chemist.
As the German Army invaded Austria in 1938, Bliss, a Jew, was sent to the concentration camps of Dachau and Buchenwald. His German wife Claire managed to get him released, and they finally became exiles in Shanghai, where Bliss had a cousin.
Bliss devised Blissymbols while a refugee at the Shanghai Ghetto and Sydney, from 1942 to 1949. He wanted to create an easy-to-learn international auxiliary language to allow communication between different linguistic communities. He was inspired by Chinese characters, with which he became familiar at Shanghai.
Bliss’s system was explained in his work Semantography (1949, 2nd ed. 1965, 3rd ed. 1978.) It had several names:
In 1942 I named my symbols World Writing, then chose in 1947 an international scientific term Semantography (from Greek semanticos significant meaning, and graphein to write) .... My friends argued that is customary to name new writing systems after the inventors .... Blissymbolics, or Blissymbols, or simply Bliss .... (1965, p. 8)
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