Your second point, that it's never worked before, is fallacious. One only need to look to China and realize that their *ideographic* writing was a major factor in the cohesiveness of their dynasties.
Your third point, about typing, is valid. There are alternatives to keyboard typing such as David MacKay's Dasher. In fact, he's working on incorporating a variation of Blissymbolics, called the Semantic Alphabet, into his program.
Your last point is not very good. First, it's not true, and second, it's culturally insensitive. Language death is real, and a great loss to the human species. I can only hope that someday, you will see the error in your thinking.
All writing systems are symbolic, including phonetic ones. A proper classification of Blissymbolics is that it is ideographic. The ideographs themselves tend to be indices (essentially, signs that have some structural relationship to that which they signify).
I've been working to get Blissymbolics a topic of discussion for about a year now. Blissymbolics was invented by Charles K. Bliss about fifty years ago for the purposes of being a universal auxiliary writing system. As such, there is no phonetics -- it is solely symbolic (or more technically, indexical). The idea behind this is that it doesn't matter what your native language is, you can still learn and communicate through Blissymbolics. Essentially, it is a workaround for the language barrier between the world's languages.
It is also remarkeably easy to learn. The current user population is people with cerebral palsy, who are able to use symbol boards to communicate, and also some people who are mentally handicapped and would ordinarily be illiterate.
After reading a BBC article on the combinatoric explosion of translations facing the EU (http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/europe/3499393.s tm), I decided to write the Directorate General for Translation at the EU. So far, there has not been much of a response. Charles Bliss faced a similar problem where he wrote tens of thousands of letters to officials in various governments, pleading the case for a simple, yet powerful solution that is Blissymbolics, but he was met mostly by silence.
I guess a Blissymbolics revolution would nescessarily need to start at a grassroots level. There's some work being done on a browser that can automatically display pages in various languages in various symbol systems, including, I think, Blissymbolics. But the number one principle of marketing is need recognition, which is complicated in the case of Blissymbolics because it seems like you have to believe in it in order to see how it would fill the very broad and vague need for universal communication. A Blissymbolic browser might be great for tapping the linguisitc diversity of the internet, but you'd have to find it worthwhile to learn Blissymbolics in the first place.
There is an arguably better solution which is to agree on a common writing system (note that adopting a common writing system is more feasible than adopting a common language as one need not learn any phonology). Fifty years ago, a man by the name of Charles K. Bliss developed a system he hoped that, in the future, would become universally adopted. His invention was dubbed Blissymbolics. It is currently used in the field of augmentative and assistive communication where it gives language to those who would, due to handicap, be unable to communicate with any fluency.
The basic idea behind Blissymbolics is to use mostly indexical ideographs - that is to say, eg, the symbol for man looks somewhat like a stick figure man. There are some pure symbols, however, though they somewhat conventional - for instance, a heart shaped symbol represents emotion. However, it is not limited to concrete meanings, and, though I doubt it could be proved, I believe it's has the same capability for expression as any other writing system, including English writing, due to its compositionality. Couple that with the fact that it can be learned quite easily, one might begin to see that yes, this is a better solution. I am dedicated to this ideal, so if you get a chance, check out http://www.activebliss.com/ for more information about the ideal of universal communication. Cheers, Matt Landau
Slashdot Mirror
Your second point, that it's never worked before, is fallacious. One only need to look to China and realize that their *ideographic* writing was a major factor in the cohesiveness of their dynasties.
Your third point, about typing, is valid. There are alternatives to keyboard typing such as David MacKay's Dasher. In fact, he's working on incorporating a variation of Blissymbolics, called the Semantic Alphabet, into his program.
Your last point is not very good. First, it's not true, and second, it's culturally insensitive. Language death is real, and a great loss to the human species. I can only hope that someday, you will see the error in your thinking.
All writing systems are symbolic, including phonetic ones. A proper classification of Blissymbolics is that it is ideographic. The ideographs themselves tend to be indices (essentially, signs that have some structural relationship to that which they signify).
I've been working to get Blissymbolics a topic of discussion for about a year now. Blissymbolics was invented by Charles K. Bliss about fifty years ago for the purposes of being a universal auxiliary writing system. As such, there is no phonetics -- it is solely symbolic (or more technically, indexical). The idea behind this is that it doesn't matter what your native language is, you can still learn and communicate through Blissymbolics. Essentially, it is a workaround for the language barrier between the world's languages.
s tm), I decided to write the Directorate General for Translation at the EU. So far, there has not been much of a response. Charles Bliss faced a similar problem where he wrote tens of thousands of letters to officials in various governments, pleading the case for a simple, yet powerful solution that is Blissymbolics, but he was met mostly by silence.
It is also remarkeably easy to learn. The current user population is people with cerebral palsy, who are able to use symbol boards to communicate, and also some people who are mentally handicapped and would ordinarily be illiterate.
After reading a BBC article on the combinatoric explosion of translations facing the EU (http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/europe/3499393.
I guess a Blissymbolics revolution would nescessarily need to start at a grassroots level. There's some work being done on a browser that can automatically display pages in various languages in various symbol systems, including, I think, Blissymbolics. But the number one principle of marketing is need recognition, which is complicated in the case of Blissymbolics because it seems like you have to believe in it in order to see how it would fill the very broad and vague need for universal communication. A Blissymbolic browser might be great for tapping the linguisitc diversity of the internet, but you'd have to find it worthwhile to learn Blissymbolics in the first place.
There is an arguably better solution which is to agree on a common writing system (note that adopting a common writing system is more feasible than adopting a common language as one need not learn any phonology). Fifty years ago, a man by the name of Charles K. Bliss developed a system he hoped that, in the future, would become universally adopted. His invention was dubbed Blissymbolics. It is currently used in the field of augmentative and assistive communication where it gives language to those who would, due to handicap, be unable to communicate with any fluency.
The basic idea behind Blissymbolics is to use mostly indexical ideographs - that is to say, eg, the symbol for man looks somewhat like a stick figure man. There are some pure symbols, however, though they somewhat conventional - for instance, a heart shaped symbol represents emotion. However, it is not limited to concrete meanings, and, though I doubt it could be proved, I believe it's has the same capability for expression as any other writing system, including English writing, due to its compositionality. Couple that with the fact that it can be learned quite easily, one might begin to see that yes, this is a better solution. I am dedicated to this ideal, so if you get a chance, check out http://www.activebliss.com/ for more information about the ideal of universal communication.
Cheers,
Matt Landau