Blissymbolics

Blissymbolics is a symbolic graphic language of several thousand signs. A Bliss character can be joined to another, and joined again, to make a new sign. Bliss words can be set in sequence to form sentences, including a good deal of grammar. The shapes are simple so they can be drawn quickly.

The characters do not stand for the sounds of any spoken language. That is the difference from the major writing systems of the world. Each basic symbol stands for a concept. New concepts are written by composing those basics, which is why Bliss called the system an ideographic writing system of several hundred root signs.

Charles K. Bliss

Charles K. Bliss (1897–1985) was born Karl Kasiel Blitz in the Austro-Hungarian Empire, in a city where many peoples lived side by side and, as he later wrote, hated one another largely because they spoke and thought in different languages. He found the rules of those languages arbitrary. He would not accept that children had to be drilled in the difference between one kind of pronoun and another. What impressed him instead were the symbol systems of mathematics and chemistry, which a reader can follow without sharing the author's mother tongue.

He first called his invention Semantography. He meant it as a universal written language for people who did not share speech. The signs later took his name. A typed adaptation that keeps his combinatorial logic, but places grammatical markers at the end of each sign so the line can be written like ordinary text, is described on the Semantic Alphabet page. That adaptation is a different system and should not be mistaken for Blissymbolics itself.