Beyond Blissymbolics
If there is a disadvantage to the Blissymbolics system, it is that it fails Chao’s (1968) first criterion for a symbolic system – simplicity, and his fifth – balance between number of symbols and size of symbol complexes. Some symbols, such as that for ‘jealous’, may require four or five separate symbols on a line. Moreover, instruction in the system needs to build from the semantic primes, some of which are to be found in Blissymbolics manuals (e.g., McDonald, 1980), and some of which require to be learned from experience of finding them in symbols.
If LI support is to be avoided, and yet Vygotskyan scaffolding is to be applied to L2 texts, then a more concise, yet pictorial way of imparting meaning is required. Pictures themselves are, of course, ambiguous. A picture of a white rabbit could be used to gloss ‘lapin’, ‘blanc’, ‘mammifere’ or even ‘oreilles’. Blissymbolics, on the other hand, has the advantage of having at its heart a set of semantic primes, partly tacit. If a system of international symbols to be used as scaffolding were to be developed, it would be necessary not only to look at such linguistic semantic primes, but also the question of the primes that would constitute a visual system and which would be culturally accessible across languages – no easy task. Even apparently simple concepts such as that of colour are not isomorphic across languages (Berlin & Kay, 1969). The representation of meanings across languages is not a one-to-one mapping.
Online symbolics such as Widgit (www.widgit.com) combine pictures, conventional symbols and specially created icons in order to render the meaning of texts (including those in foreign languages) clear to the reader. The mixture, however, does not demonstrate a tightly organised and well thought-out system, and lacks the systematicity of Blissymbolics, as it does not use a set of semantic primes. That translation is generally possible across language suggests that an author’s intended meaning in one language may be rendered into another, i.e. there is sufficient conceptual overlap for the words used in one language to be replaced by the words of another without loss of meaning. The problem, then, is to find a visual system which by its very appearance renders the same concepts comprehensible in two languages, or bridges a gap between languages which do not have the same concepts.
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