In the Land of Invented Languages

harder to recognize. The sound and meaning cues would have gotten weaker and less helpful. People would have had to resort more and more to just memorizing the glyphs. Imagine this scenario and what you end up with is Chinese writing.

Chinese writing does not operate on a pictographic principle, but Bliss, like a lot of people, became besotted with the idea that it did. He couldn’t really be blamed for this impression. The teacher he hired probably started him off with the most iconic characters, as most teachers do:

 

Then Bliss would have learned about the poetic ways in which characters combine to make compound characters:

 

In this simple introduction to Chinese writing, Bliss would have found the primary elements that inspired his own system—pictographic symbols that represented concepts, and a method for combining them to make other concepts.

But he would then start learning a lot of characters that didn’t look anything like what they meant, and a lot of compound characters that had no nice poetic explanation. So he would just have to memorize them, and the more characters he would learn, the harder they would be to remember. And so it makes sense that after a year of learning, he gave up.

But if he had been learning to speak Chinese as well as write it—if he hadn’t been so impressed that he could read out the characters in his own language—perhaps he would have gotten further. Pronouncing the characters in Chinese, rather than in his own language, would help him to see why the character for “clamp,” for example, is formed like this:

 

It takes this form not because it has some conceptual thing to do with horses but because it is pronounced ma—just as the word “horse” is (but with a different tone). The tree part of the character provides a vague semantic clue that is open to interpretation (clamps are used on wood?), but the horse part is a much more reliable pointer to “clamp” because it doesn’t take you on some roundabout journey of connotation to a concept. Instead, it sets you down on a nice straight path and gives you a little shove toward a word.

Unfortunately, the sound aspect of Chinese characters is not always so readily apparent. Thousands of years of language change coupled with a conservative writing tradition will do that. Look at English, after only a few hundred years of change, holding on to forms like “light” and “knee,” when the pronunciations that gave rise to those spellings are no longer used. The situation in Chinese writing is much worse.

Still, most characters, more than 90 percent, give you some clue about the pronunciation of the word. You can’t depend on those clues entirely, but it makes the task of learning and remembering thousands of characters a little bit easier. Chinese writing doesn’t represent spoken language in the way that alphabetic writing does, but it still represents spoken language—just in a much more complicated way.

But what of the observation, marveled at since Westerners began reporting from the Far East in the sixteenth century, that character writing is understood throughout Asia? How can it be that people who speak completely different, non–mutually intelligible languages understand each other in character writing? The truth is, they don’t. At least not in the way you would imagine from the ever popular “characters transcend language and go straight to concepts” account.

The Chinese writing system is based on Mandarin Chinese. Other languages spoken in China, like Cantonese, are different but historically related—about as similar as French and Italian are. So what happens when a Cantonese speaker picks up a Mandarin newspaper? Does he just read it off into his own language? No. Essentially, he reads it in Mandarin. In order to become literate, he has had to learn the Mandarin way of marking grammatical distinctions and the Mandarin way of putting sentences together. He may not have learned the Mandarin way of pronouncing every word, but many of the Cantonese pronunciations are similar (as are the French jour and the Italian giorno), so the sound clues in the characters are sometimes helpful. However, they are much less helpful, so he has had to do a lot more brute memorization. This is why it has taken him a couple of years longer than a Mandarin speaker to become literate.

As for a Japanese speaker, he does not understand the Mandarin newspaper at all. His spoken language is about as similar to Mandarin as Hungarian is to English. However, for historical reasons, Japanese is partially written with Chinese characters (along with other characters that stand for sounds). So when a Japanese speaker sees a Mandarin newspaper, he may indeed be able to recognize a number of the characters, but that doesn’t mean he will be able to form anything more than a fuzzy guess at what it all means. The situation is comparable to a Hungarian speaker seeing the English sentence “I saw the information about the crime on television.” Because Hungarian makes use of the international loanwords informacio, krimi, and televizio, a speaker will recognize “information … crime … television,” and she might guess the meaning of the sentence correctly. However, she might make the same guess if the sentence says, “I took the information about the crime and hid it behind the television,” and in that case her guess would be quite off the mark. And anyway, her interpretation of “crime” is probably wrong to begin with, since krimi means not “crime” but “crime story” or “detective novel” in Hungarian. The best a Japanese speaker can do with a Chinese text is pull out a big jumble of words. And a lot of them will mean something slightly—or even totally—different from what they mean in the Chinese version.

No, Chinese characters do not offer a magical ride to the land of pure ideas. Just a f@!*% hard slog to the city of words.

The Spacemen Speak

After Bliss’s first visit to Toronto things started to look up for Blissymbolics. He now had a real, practical success story to add to his dossier. He commenced an aggressive letter-writing campaign that got him some major international press, including an article in Time magazine. People from all over the world began to contact the center in Ontario, looking for more information about its program. McNaughton and her team began to develop educational materials and a teacher training protocol, so that others could take advantage of this new communication tool.

The more successful the program became, the more Bliss complained about the way the teachers at the center were doing things. They didn’t draw the lines thick enough; the proportions were wrong; they used “fancy” terms like “nouns” and “verbs” (terms used by the evil grammar teachers, the torturers of his youth) to describe what he called “things” and “actions.” Every time McNaughton sent him materials to look over, he wrote back lengthy tirades about all the ways they had gotten his system wrong. He was outraged that in one of their textbooks, they showed his symbol for vegetable, , next to a picture of various vegetables, including tomatoes. They had totally misunderstood his system! This was the symbol for things you eat (mouth symbol) that grow underground! Tomatoes don’t grow underground! The symbol for those kinds of vegetables is this:!

Bliss failed to see that the ultimate goal of the program was to teach the children to express themselves in English. At first, the iconicity of the symbols was important. The children couldn’t read yet, so they needed a way to recognize a word. The teachers would introduce a new symbol by pointing out how it resembled the object it stood for or, in the case of more abstract symbols, by explaining its motivation. Then the symbol would be added to each child’s symbol board—a grid of squares, each containing a symbol, with the English word written underneath it. In interactions with others, the children would pick out a word by recognizing its symbol and pointing to it; the person they were talking to would understand it by reading the English below it. Over time, with the use and interaction by which we all come to understand the meaning of words, the imagery in the symbol would become