From Australia’s Jewish Past
Charles K Bliss – the inventor of a universal language employing symbols
Charles Bliss
On 5 September 1897, Charles was born Karl Kassel Blittz, in Czerenowitz, which at that time was part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, now in Ukraine.
His mother Jeanette and father Michel were German-speaking Jews who grew up in Czernowitz. The town had a diverse population including, Germans, Romanians, Ukrainians, Poles and Jews, and Romani. Charles would reflect in later years, saying “Where I lived, we spoke about six different languages. There was no need for a little boy like me to realise how stupid it was to speak six different languages.” Charles was the eldest of four children.
He grew up in an environment of poverty, cold and starvation. His father supported the family by working as a mechanic, optician, and wood-turner. Unfortunately, Charles was a frequent target of antisemitism at school and, when he was eight years old, Russia lost the Russo-Japanese War and pogroms against the Jews intensified. At the same time, he saw a slide show of the Austro-Hungarian North Pole Expedition which inspired him to study engineering to improve technology for ordinary people.
Charles said the symbols on his father’s circuit diagrams made instant sense to him. They were a “logical language” and, impressed by chemical symbols, he thought they could be read by anyone, regardless of their mother tongue.
During World War 1, Charles volunteered first with the Red Cross field ambulance, then as a soldier in the Austro-Hungarian Army. The family fled to Vienna after the Imperial Russian Army occupied Czernowitz in 1916. After the war, he studied and graduated in 1922 from the Vienna University of Technology as a chemical engineer. He then joined Telefunken, a German radio apparatus company, where he successfully worked up to the position of chief of the patent department.
Unfortunately, with the situation brewing in Europe, and the arrival of the Third Reich in Austria in March 1938, as a Jew, Charles was sent to Dachau concentration camp. Later he was moved to Buckenwald. Before the war, he had married Claire, a German Catholic but despite her constant efforts she was not able to have him released until 1939 and he left for England immediately. Once in England, he tried to bring his wife Claire there, but the outbreak of the War in September 1939 made that impossible. It was there that because the Nazi bombing of England was called the “blitz” he changed his family name to Bliss.
Charles arranged for his wife Claire to escape Germany via his family in Romania, but she needed to leave there and moved to Greece where she was safe until October 1940 when Italy invaded Greece. The couple reunited on Christmas Eve 1940, after which Claire travelled east to Shanghai and Charles to Shanghai via Canada and Japan. After the Japanese occupied Shanghai, the couple were placed into the Hongkew ghetto. Claire, as a German and a Christian had the option of claiming her German citizenship, applying for a divorce and being released. She did not do so and instead accompanied Charles into the ghetto.
In Shanghai, Charles became interested in Chinese characters, which he mistakenly thought were ideograms. He studied them and learned how to read shop signs and Chinese newspapers. With some astonishment, he one day realised that he had been reading the symbols off not in Chinese, but in his own, language, German. With ideograms as his inspiration, he developed a writing system with pictures. At that time, he had not become aware of Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz’s “Universal Symbolism.
With the war over, Charles and Claire migrated to Australia, arriving in July 1946. His semiotic ideas met with universal rejection. Charles, without any Australian or Commonwealth qualifications, had to work as a labourer to support his family. He worked on his system of symbols at night. Claire and he did become Australian citizens.
Originally Charles had called his system “World Writing” because the aim was to establish a series of symbols that would be understood by all, regardless of language. He then decided an English-language name was too restricted and called the system Semantography. In Sydney in 1949 Charles published the three-volume International Semantography: A non-alphabetical Symbol Writing readable in all languages. There was no great positive reaction. Over the next four years, Claire sent 6,000 letters to educators and universities, to no better effect. In 1965, Charles published a second edition of his work, Semantography (Blissymbolics). It was about this time, that the increase in international tourism convinced many that only a pictorial symbol language could be understood by all. Charles made sure his idea was attached to his name, hence Blissymbolics.
In 1971, Bliss learned that since 1965, the Ontario Crippled Children’s Centre in Toronto Canada (now known as the Holland Bloorview Kids Rehabilitation Hospital) had been using his symbols to teach children with cerebral palsy to communicate. He was thrilled at first and travelled to Canada, but became horrified when he learned that the centre had extended his set of symbols and was using them as a bridge to help the children learn to use spoken and written words in a traditional language, which was far from his vision for Blissymbolics. He badgered and eventually sued the centre, at one time even threatening a nurse with imprisonment. After ten years of constant attacks from Charles, the centre reached a compromise with him because they felt the publicity they were getting was bringing a bad name to the centre. The world copyright to use his symbols with handicapped children was licensed to the Blissymbolics Communication Foundation in Canada.
Charles was the subject of the 1974 film ‘’Mr Symbol Man’’, a co-production of Film Australia and the National Film Board of Canada. In 1976, Charles became a Member of the Order of Australia (A.M.) for services to the community, particularly to handicapped children. Based on the recognition of the innovative nature of his work, Charles was appointed, in 1979, as an Honorary Fellow in Linguistics at the Australian National University, by the (then) Head of the ANU School of Linguistics, Professor Bob Dixon.
After the death of his wife in 1961, the Semantography Trust Fund was established under the terms of her will, to propagate the Bliss concept. In 1974, Film Australia and the National Film Board of Canada made a film about Bliss entitled Mr Symbol Man. The Blissymbolics Communication Foundation was established in Toronto, Canada in 1975, to maintain standard symbol form and to provide training and materials for people who apply Blissymbolics with non-speaking persons. The Foundation was renamed the Blissymbolics Communication Institute in 1978.
Charles passed away on 13 July 1985 in Sydney’s Prince of Wales Hospital after a short illness.
The AJHS acknowledges the following references in the preparation of this story:
Wikipedia, Australian National University, National Library of Australia, Encyclopedia of Australian Science and Innovation
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