The Universal Language That Found Its Real Use Decades Late

Charles Bliss survived Buchenwald and Dachau, escaped to Shanghai, and spent the late 1940s designing what he called Semantography — a writing system of about 100 visual elements that could be combined to express any meaning, in any language. He believed that if humans shared a script free from spoken language, they would stop misunderstanding each other into wars. He published it in 1949. It was largely ignored.

The symbols are not pictures of objects so much as small logical diagrams. A heart over an upward arrow means "happy" — feeling that goes up. A heart over a downward arrow means "sad." The symbol for "protection" is a person under a roof. A grammatical mark above a symbol turns it into an adjective or a verb. With a few hundred basic shapes and modifiers, a Bliss user can build a sentence about anything.

In 1971, a teacher at the Ontario Crippled Children's Centre named Shirley McNaughton was looking for a way to give nonverbal children with cerebral palsy a means of communication. The standard alphabet didn't work — the kids couldn't sequence letters. McNaughton found Bliss's book and tried the symbols on a board. Children who had been treated as cognitively absent started forming sentences within weeks.

Bliss was furious about the adaptation. He had wanted his system used by world governments, not by disabled children, and he sued. The Toronto team eventually licensed his work and kept going.

A system designed to bridge nations ended up bridging something more intimate: the gap between a child and the inside of her own head.