Semantography was invented by
Charles K. Bliss (1897–1985), born Karl Kasiel Blitz to a
Jewish family in
Chernivtsi (then Czernowitz, Austria-Hungary), 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. After the
Nazi annexation of Austria in 1938, Bliss was sent to concentration camps but his German wife Claire managed to get him released, and they finally became exiles in
Shanghai, where Bliss had a cousin. Bliss devised the symbols 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 published his system in
Semantography (1949, exp. 2nd ed. 1965, 3rd ed. 1978.) It had several names: As the "tourist explosion" took place in the 1960s, a number of researchers were looking for new standard symbols to be used at roads, stations, airports, etc. Bliss then adopted the name
Blissymbolics in order that no researcher could plagiarize his system of symbols. Since the 1960s/1970s, Blissymbols have become popular as a method to teach disabled people to communicate. In 1971, Shirley McNaughton started a pioneer program at the
Ontario Crippled Children's Centre (OCCC), aimed at children with
cerebral palsy, from the approach of
augmentative and alternative communication (AAC). According to
Arika Okrent, Bliss used to complain about the way the teachers at the OCCC were using the symbols, in relation to the proportions of the symbols and other questions: for example, they used "fancy" terms like "nouns" and "verbs", to describe what Bliss called "things" and "actions". (2009, p. 173-4). The ultimate objective of the OCCC program was to use Blissymbols as a practical way to teach the children to express themselves in their mother tongue, since the Blissymbols provided visual keys to understand the meaning of the English words, especially the abstract words. In
Semantography, Bliss had not provided a systematic set of definitions for his symbols (there was a provisional vocabulary index instead (1965, pp. 827–67)), so McNaughton's team might often interpret a certain symbol in a way that Bliss would later criticize as a "misinterpretation". For example, they might interpret a tomato as a vegetable —according to the English definition of tomato— even though the ideal Blissymbol of vegetable was restricted by Bliss to just vegetables growing underground. Eventually the OCCC staff modified and adapted Bliss's system in order to make it serve as a bridge to English. (2009, p. 189) Bliss' complaints about his symbols "being abused" by the OCCC became so intense that the director of the OCCC told Bliss, on his 1974 visit, never to come back. In spite of this, in 1975, Bliss granted an exclusive world license, for use with disabled children, to the new Blissymbolics Communication Foundation directed by Shirley McNaughton (later called Blissymbolics Communication International, BCI). Nevertheless, in 1977, Bliss claimed that this agreement was violated so that he was deprived of effective control of his symbol system. According to Okrent (2009, p. 190), there was a final period of conflict, as Bliss would make continuous criticisms to McNaughton often followed by apologies. Bliss finally brought his lawyers back to the OCCC, reaching a settlement: Blissymbolic Communication International now claims an exclusive license from Bliss, for the use and publication of Blissymbols for persons with communication, language, and learning difficulties. The Blissymbol method has been used in Canada, Sweden, and a few other countries. Practitioners of Blissymbolics (that is, speech and language therapists and users) maintain that some users who have learned to communicate with Blissymbolics find it easier to learn to read and write traditional orthography in the local spoken language than do users who did not know Blissymbolics. == The speech question ==