Blissymbols – Ideographic Writing System | Hacker News Reader

Blissymbols – Ideographic Writing System

en.wikipedia.org

Essential listening - https://radiolab.org/podcast/bliss

A nice read https://letterformarchive.org/news/blissymbolics/

And the film https://archive.org/details/mrsymbolman

Blissymbols is kind of fun to look at for a toki pona speaker; sitelen pona (the most popular hieroglyphic script for the language) shares a lot of features with it and Egyptian hieroglyphics. And it's pretty comprehensible—maybe easier for beginners than Roman script in some weird ways—while being tied to a whole speakable language that is decently easy to pick up. Might be fun for some of the people who think Blissymbols looks cool.

That reminds me, a bit, of Hobo Signs.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hobo#Hobo_signs_and_graffiti

Unfortunately it looks like this hasn't taken off. An international pictographic language is a great idea tho. This is a better approach imo: https://artreview.com/ara-springsummer-2014-book-review-xu-b... This pictographic book is readable without any training.

It is not text written in a language; it's a cartoon/manga drawn in the style of pictograms, depicting events literally, not symbolically.

It's using pictograms and ideograms to tell a story, implicitly using a language. This can and should be extended to a general purpose language.

Stories inferred from pictures or videos are not implicitly using language. Language comes into the picture only when a human viewer interprets what is happening and describes it in words.

E.g. if we watch an unnarrated nature video of a squirrel gathering nuts into its burrow, we can describe it with words and sentences. But those sentences don't actually occur in the video, implicitly or otherwise, and can say misleading things, like that the squirrel is thinking forward to next winter, and planning for having enough to eat when foraging becomes difficult.

The pictures in Xu Bing's book would have to be logograms rather than pictograms in order for the book to contain language.

A sequence of pictograms could be used to record a story (say of events shared by a group of people). Those pictograms could be used to stir their accurate recollection of the events, which they could talk about in language. But that's not the same thing as actually recording that language.

It took off then stagnated a bit. Used a lot in Canada and Iceland, Norway, Sweden and various parts of the globe eg Eastern Europe. There is various projects further developing it still

That book you referenced is cool. But it’s not depicting a true language. Language has rules which allows you to generate new novel words and sentences. This is what bliss does and why it’s called a language - rather than all other symbol systems

There is definitely potential for something like this but the symbols seemtoo simplistic - with software they don't need to be easy to draw.

Simplistic was the aim. Have a watch of the film in the comments above. It was designed as a universal language.

I'm reminded of the Peabody Rebus Reading System, an old (1960s) system for reading pedagogy based on the "whole word reading" idea in which a text is presented as a series of pictograms representing words, which are gradually replaced with their corresponding words. My sister learned to read this way, though she doesn't remember it.

Mix these with the ISO standard for pictograms and a dose of written Chinese, especially the catalog of radicals. Blend.

If you watch the film youll realize it was somewhat based on ideas from pictorial languages - mainly Chinese

NB Michael Everson has been plugging away at the iso standard for a while https://www.unicode.org/wg2/docs/n5149-blissymbols-keyboards...

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