#semantography

Semantography (Blissymbolic): A Logical Writing for an Illogical World, C. K. Bliss

Blissymbols (or "semantography"): invented by Charles K. Bliss (1897–1985), born Karl Kasiel Blitz, a Jew living in a climate of fierce anti-Semitism in the Austro-Hungarian city of Czernowitz, which was home to a mixture of different nationalities that “hated each other, mainly because they spoke and thought in different languages.” Originally a chemical engineer, Blitz was placed in concentration camps at Dachau and Buchenwald during World War II, and finally emigrated to first Great Britain (where he changed his name from Karl Blitz to Charles Bliss, to avoid association with German air raids) and later Shanghai, where he became fascinated with the Chinese system of writing using symbols. Bliss believed that the root of human conflict was the insufficiency of language to convey ideas. The aim of his system was to establish a series of symbols that could be understood immediately by all, regardless of language, and be simple enough to be easily reproduced by printing machines and typewriters.