The Book to the Film ‘Mr. Symbol Man’ by Charles K. Bliss (review)

SLS 20 (1978), 275-285 0 Linstok Press, Inc. The Book to the Film'Mr. Symbol Man', by Charles K. Bliss. Semantography-Blissymbolics Publications (P.O.Box 222, Coogee, Sydney, Australia 2034). Paperback. 192pp. illus. (n.d., 1975). approx. $6. This engaging and at times irritating book tells in his own words the story of Charles Bliss, who invented, developed, and promotes, altruistically, Blissymbolics. It presents also the graphic symbols themselves, but in protesting the author's no-nonsense objections to linguistics and metaphysics, it leads the reader along the garden paths laid out by an amateur metaphysician. The original purpose of Blissymbolics, it emerges, was no less than the repeal of the Act of Babel: that is,to substitute for the alphabetic symbols of western cultures-which lead to misunderstanding, war, perverse ideologies, and worse-a system of simple, self-explanatory, and logical graphic symbols with which all good, true, and decent human thoughts may be expressed, and which used will immediately expose any attempt at propaganda, falsehood, or nonsense. This purpose , strongly reminiscent of early manifestos of the general semanticists, might interest students of sign languages, since the Blissymbols are certainly graphic signs. A very practical use of these symbols, at least some of them, however, has brought them to the notice of teachers of handicapped children-teachers whose interest is pragmatic rather than theoretical. My own purpose in writing this review is not to examine the application of the symbols in the learning of nine children at the Ontario Crippled Children's Centre (Toronto). This has been ably done in the book itself by the contribution of Shirley McNaughton (pp. 141-148, and 178-185) In the theory behind the symbols, however, there are pitfalls that could be avoided. Teachers need not be theoreticians, but not knowing the essential difference between a fixed symbol-to-meaning system and a language, they may well expect more in cognitive and communicative growth than any such fixed system can deliver-even though its initial use Sign Language Studies 20 brings a dramatic breakthrough in seemingly hopeless cases. Doing something right while thinking mistakenly about it is still obviously better than doing nothing or doing something wrong, but doing it right and thinking sanely about it is better still, and in this spirit this review is intended. A representative sample of both symbols and theory can be found on pages 127f: It is logical English to put up TO something. But to put up somebody means to provide him with a bed !-< for the night. To put off something, means not doing it - A, and to put up with somebody means to suffer his presence. To put down .L0 something is logical English. But to put down something means also to write \ it down. "Will you do A me a favour ? " is logical English. But 'will you do me? " means will you paint a picture D 0 of me. And "will you do me in? " means "will you report 0 me to the police, or will you tell 0 my wife or my boss ? " No wonder that the mind of every foreign student of English boggles at this linguistic nonsense which means real nonsense when translated in his mother ,tongue. But when he would learn my symbols for thing O up t down bed " doing A suffer C)& write \ picture 0 0 report, tell 0 he could assemble a number of my symbols and would Review find the corresponding word in his mother tongue and in English. Using the English words for the corresponding words of his mother tongue he would speak English by translating sentences from his mother tongue. (127f) Despite the fact that use of Bliss symbols printed on large charts facilitates communication by children too severely handicapped to speak or make precise arm-hand movements, the ideas in this passage are untenable. Bliss holds that English is "logical" only when the thought being expressed uses the simplest and most common expression of it; such examples as "Put down that book;" or "Do me a favor;" seem to satisfy his requirements of logic, simplicity, and usage frequency. But Bliss is uncomfortable, as everyone is, when first encountering an idiom in a language or dialect not his mother tongue. Knowing all the literal and idiomatic uses that Bliss has mentioned in this passage for put down and do, one might still be puzzled by the phrase, "That's only a put down. " It is also possible that a learner of English might discover that do is a general verb replacer (called a pro-verb in linguistic jargon), and so be able to generalize that "I'll do you next; " might be said by a barber, or a tax accountant in a busy office, or by a paperhanger-as well as by Bliss's portrait painter. What Bliss calls throughout the book "logical" and "illogical" uses of English are more calmly referred to as literal and idiomatic expressions (See Chafe's Meaning and the Structure of Language and the review in Sign Language Studies 1 for a fuller treatment of idioms in this context). What Bliss objects to as "the criminal negligence of our language teachers" (7, 16, 128) is an essential trait of languages, literally of human beings as users of language. It can be expressed in homely terms by saying that pairs of expressions with meanings have always been free to change partners. Such freedom is what makes language language. Systems in which meanings are firmly fixed to expression can be useful and beneficial-for instance the color contrast and meaning difference of red and green lights at intersections (for those with normal vision; and the vertical arrangement and different patterns in the glass for the colorblind). But such systems are not language and cannot operate for long as language can; nevertheless language Sign Language Studies 20 users always and everywhere have been free to shift, to be creative, while still within the extremely wide confines of a particular language system. Yet language users may and often do incur criticism and anger of the kind Bliss displays in his book from other users of the same language. It might seem that language users could be grouped into innovators and objecters, those who welcome, seek out, and zestfully use idioms, and those who avoid and abhor them; but such a grouping will not hold up for a moment. Every user of a language uses idioms as well as literal expressions . Today's simple and common expression becomes tomorrow's idiom. The stance of accepting literal English and rejecting idiomatic English becomes impossible if one asks how a literal expression (like put down) for one enougrt came to be the simplest and most common expression for a different thought. Bliss, more interested in inventing a new language for mankind and so eliminating many of life's major problems than in looking at language and thought, has chosen as his examples two words, which as effectively as any in the language invalidate his whole theory. The words put and do in their literal uses of today would have been responded to as wild or irresponsible idioms a few hundred years ago. Put once meant literally to 'push' or 'thrust'. Therefore if someone in the reign of Edward I had said, "He putte doun hys spere; " this could only mean that he thrust the spear into the ground. And the original meaning of the root from which do derives is 'put', 'set', 'place'. Just as clear to the scholar of languages as Bliss's logic is to him is the strange truth that every literal expression in a language was once a new idiom; every now common and,simple expression was once a new and imaginative pairing of an old common word or phrase with a new meaning. What makes an expression of a thought in English seem simple is simply its repeated use, but by the time it becomes most common, it is most likely to have acquired several extended or idiomatic uses as well. Even in the passage quoted above, Bliss seems to be unaware that the freedom to change partners, to reassort thoughts and expressions of them, is perhaps the basic characteristic of language. As an engineer (He so describes himself on page 26, but an engineering approach to language is apparent throughout), he surely knows that a 50-foot girder really measures only 49 feet and 9 or 10 inches, so that several of them end to end, in Review a structure joined to allow for expansion, will fit in a multiple of 50 feet. But the engineer who accepts the expression "50footer " as a convenient way to talk about girders 49. 85 feet long is also fully confident that every girder so symbolized will not vary beyond a standard tolerance. Bliss is comfortable with English put down in two uses, as 'lower' I and as 'record' \ . He can cope also with the British or Commonwealth idiom "do me in" as expression of the thought 'report my actions' or 'tell on me', by giving it his symbol 0-but this literally in his system is the mouth, talk, or say; although in other contexts the circle stands for the sun. Apparently he has not encountered such a use as that in, "I'm afraid they'll do me in; " in the tougher American idiom meaning 'kill me'. Of course, once that meaning is understood, the Bliss symbol for kill can be used in translating the thought. Ideally, applied in the way its inventor intends, the system of Blissymbolics would give a unique expression to every different thought, but human expression has yet to fit an ideal system. Like the "general semantics" of the 1920's and 30's, Blissymbolics if it could be applied would usefully separate literal fact from propaganda-or in colloquial speech, truth from poetry. But who really knows the dividing line between truth and poetry? And how does he know for sure? Do we really want a system of writing that pretends to make that decision for us ? Or would we not be treating the products of our minds as engineers now treat the products of a cow's udder: First they homogenize it, pasteurize it, stabilize it, and package it. Next they point out that its only virtues in our coffee is its fat for taste and its whitening agents for the visual effect. Finally they have us putting into our coffee a concoction of waste fat from the slaughterhouse and assorted chemicals that have never been near a cow. Bliss, like the general semanticists, seems to believe that words or natural languages, especially in alphabetic and conventional writing, lie and deceive but that his symbols cannot be false. He is correct in a trivial way; symbols cannot lie as long as a circle is a circle and a square is a square. But when its users make a circle now a sign for the sun, now for the open mouth, now for what emerges from the mouth in speech, now for a village of small population on a road map, etc., etc.; then the possibility of misunderstanding or even deceit enters the realm of Bliss symbols too. Sign Language Studies 20 The application of his symbols to get communication started, thought expressed, by severely handicapped children was not originally envisaged by Bliss, though it is ably reported in the book. This of course is a highly commendable application,\but the inventor of the symbols wants them to do more. He quotes "these prophetic words" of Basil Hall Chamberlain of Tokyo University"' Ideographic writing will surely achieve the final victory over phonetic writing'" (19). This prophecy is being fulfilled in part in mathematics, chemistry, molecular biology, symbolic logic, and other fields; but can Chamberlain and Bliss be right in the wider sense? Can we confidently expect that in our lifetime, or in our grandchildren 's, every aspect of human life will be so clearly reduced to quantifiable and clearly separated and related parts that Blissymbols, or curve plottings, or matrices of numbers will suffice us? This rhetorical question asks whether all knowledge will be ours, and whether all humanity, even if it does not speak with one tongue, will achieve easy clear and conflictfree communication through a system of visual symbols to express the totality of human thought. So stated it must be answered negatively for several obvious and not so obvious reasons: First, our accelerating sciences may eliminate some problems either of science or of existence, but they seem to be creating new problems at least as fast as solutions. Second, human thought and language, although separable from these, evolved together with human physical form and human social culture. It may be possible to simplify and epitomize the effect of much logical thought in graphic symbols; e.g. a' + b= C 2 , or as Pythagoras may have drawn it: Likewise graphic symbols may suggest / vast and important cultural experiences: \ or But there is no great gain in eliminating (phonetic) alphabetical symbols because of their association with words of Review the spoken languages used by the thinkers whose findings they symbolize; e.g. HO DNA e = mc. 2 Third, although system builders from Plato to Russell have attacked the imprecision of natural language and recoiled from the inevitable messiness of a system that indiscriminately distills the thought or experience of a people, it may be just the imprecision of natural languages that is most important. This is not actually a paradox. In one view, the two greatest productions of humankiid are poetry and science; and though they seem at odds, like quarreling brothers they have the same progenitors. Eliminate poetry and metaphor from writing, communication , speech, and language (calling it illogic, ambiguity , and confusion-note Bliss's abhorrence of metaphor, 129), and while technology may flourish for a generation or two, true invention, revolution in science, and any joy in what technology hath wrought will die soon after the freedom to express thought in new ways has been taken away. This same line of argument applies to advocates of another kind of visual symbols. Those who invent ways to pair hand configurations and movements with the words of some (written) language such as "signed English" or,"signed Swedish" intend, like Bliss, to legislate a divorceless marriage between each sign and what it stands for. Bliss of course wants to by-pass spoken and written language and get everyone to associate a Blissymbol directly with a concept. The Manual English inventors want deaf children and their caretakers and teachers to associate a manual symbol directly with a word or a formational particle (like -ing, -ity, -ed, etc.) The latter do not want to by-pass or eliminate spoken and written language and its meanings of course, but they pay too little attention to the fact that a word and its multiplicity of meanings are associated for hearing speakers of the language by their whole lifetime of experience: hearing and speaking the expression in suitable contexts, both linguistic and social. The deaf child may find some manual symbols show a resemblance to what they mean (iconicity) but is not permitted to combine such symbols except in the lawful way of English or some other spoken language grammar-which he or she has no experience of at all. Instead of providing a deaf child Sign Language Studies 20 access to the spoken or written language, manual symbols that are too rigidly paired with words or word parts may put further out of reach the true nature of language-a flexible but grammatical relationship between thought and expression. For this reason, backed by experimental -evidence, research teams in Sweden have abandoned all attempts to force the pairing of manual signs and Swedish words and now instead use signs for sign language communication and written Swedish for teaching the reading and writing of Swedish to deaf children. For human beings visual signs, manual signs, words, and thoughts all relate, but deafness makes the relation radically different. Human intellect deals with the universe inside us and outside by symbols systematically related to one another and to thought. These symbols (on several linguistic and/or psychological levels) must be almost automatically and very rapidly produced and perceived by each individual organism. For this reason, for hearers, these symbols at the level of face-to-face give and take are vocal symbols. But for the deaf, these symbols are bodily actions visually perceived -whether the deaf person is signing and receiving signs or speaking and lipreading. For both the deaf and the hearing, the grammar of their particular language specifies how words are formed, how sentences are constructed, and how meanings are apportioned among words and sentences. For neither the deaf or the hearing are the rules of this grammar all written out and learned formally; instead they are partly part of human mental equipment from birth and partly the end effect of interacting with others using the same language. Used as a quick way to write down meanings, Bliss symbols might help in some interchanges of deaf with hearing people, but only if deaf people and hearing people became habitual users of a system which has so far proved useful for basic, minimal communication only in the most special and unpropitious circumstances. For very simple messages in a situation where no other system will work, the Bliss system, if its symbols are as transparently iconic as Bliss thinks, could close a communication gap. But after the simplest needs are satisfied, even these symbols demand a convention-a not so simple grammar of the written symbolanguage. For instance, Review 283 BLISSYMBOLS can be typed and cabled by Facsimile Telegram without any telegraphic coding, decoding, and without Translation into any language PLEASE RESERVE 1 ROOM2 BEDS BATH GARAGEARRIVE SUNDAY friendly appeal (heart) see abovereservation symbol paper held Inhold1stday facsimile Telegram ofweek (p. 137) The message is written left to right, like western alphabetic and unlike oriental ideographic script. The exclamation mark and the heart reversed in order no longer mean 'please' but 'suffer'; so Blissymbolics like English (e.g. setup \ upset) has a strict morphological system. The explanation that the two beds and the bath are to be in the room reserved, but presumably, that the garage need not be in the room itself are left to the commonsense of the reader of the Bliss gram as they are to readers of English language telegrams. The same non-explicitness leaves the reader to infer that the subject of reserve is the reader, but the one who will arrive Sunday is the sender. Sender and receiver of the ordinary English telegram, as native speakers of English, need know additionally only two conventional systems: the abbreviation of English normal sentences allowed in telegraphese, and the arrangement of hotel \accommodations and negotiations. To use the Bliss system they need also a knowledge of all the rules of symbol combination and modification-in short the grammar of Blissymbolics; as well as a vocabulary of the graphic signs. This of course will be proportionately a larger and larger requirement as the uncertainty of what the message is about and says becomes greater. Again none of this detracts from the contributions that the use of Bliss symbols has made in therapy and teaching; it should, however, remind us that any system, at first iconic enough to be readable by the unpractised, will very quickly become complex and acquire more and more arbitrary conventions as soon as it is used to follow the complexity, freedom, and uncertainty of human thought. It is important also to appreciate the dimensionality of the symbols-not simply two-dimensional but intentionally reduced to straight lines, curves, and dots as elements. The manual symbols used in the natural sign languages of the deaf are more than three dimensional, for the appearance of a handshape can be altered in two ways without any change in the shape itself. The first of these ways on paper appears as Sign Language Studies 20 static as a printed symbol on a page. Thus in Bliss symbols a door or gate is [l, but a room is :1 . In fingerspelling used by deaf and hearing persons, h is represented by u is represented by . . . . . . But the graphic symbol is rotated only in its original plane; the manual symbol can be correctly perceived from any angle whatsoever-if it is remembered that although the signer's body may mask the view from behind, the signer always sees it from "behind". The second way to alter the appearance of a manual symbol without internal change is to do something with it; this of course requires movement. A Bliss symbol is altered in the drawing to become a different (internally different) symbol for a different but by Bliss related meaning; e.g. A action A man womann A father smother kb Afamily But in American Sign Language, 'H', i.e. the two-finger hand used to spell 'h' and 'u', appears in dozens of different words, and neither its action, its presentation (pointing up, across, outward, etc.), nor where it acts , nor what it touches, nor the meanings of all these words have to be related in any natural or iconic way that connects them all. In various Manual English systems, this same handshape may keep its alphabetic association with 'h' or 'u' or n' (bent to point down) to help the user remember that it stands for a word that begins with one of these letters. Such differences of the Manual English and natural language symbol-to-meaning relationships to one another and to the relationship of symbol and meaning in the Bliss system should remind us that the logic of visual symbolics is neither simple nor single but, especially when language enters the picture, is a complex and many layered logic, dependent ultimately on the use that human beings make of its elements and relations. Possibly the most useful insight to be gained from considering Bliss symbols, manual communication, signed languages, and language together is the recognition it brings of instant and exponential acceleration-that is to say, a Review few simply formed, transparently iconic, and easily combined visible displays can serve to convey such dialogue as, - "We want food and water. " - "First, lay down your weapons! - "Who is your leader?" - "We admire your buttons." (See Hewes 1974) Or, in a different situation, - "Bobby took my apple." - "Where is your brace?" - "I have to go to the toilet." - "Wait a minute. " Such exchanges are not hard to manage in the situations they suggest, but if interaction is to become more productive of mutual assistance and ripen into genuine social mutuality, the system will lose its transparency and simplicity faster than most people like to think. It will, because its users are human, become language and like languages have layers of relationship not a sipmle and fixed symbol-meaning bond. Not only will a hand need to mean more than 'h or 'u', but a graphic symbol will have to become metaphoric, idiomatic, "illogical"-note that already the sign that is translated 'family' on the previous page is an idiom with the literal meaning 'man-roof-roof-woman'. The important question for readers of the Bliss book as for those interested in uses of manual communication is not, Can this or that ingenious invention get communication started,? Most of the devices tried so far can do that. The more effective approach is to ask and ascertain whether this or that system can attain or has inherently all the characteristics of the only system known to symbolize the complexity, variety, and creativity of human thought-in a word, language. W.C.S. REFERENCES Chafe, Wallace L. 1970 Meaning and the Structure of Language (Chicago, The University of Chicago Press). Hewes, Gordon W. 1974 Gesture Language in Culture Contact, Sign Language Studies 4, 1-34. ...