I have recently developed the habit of listening to various podcasts on my Kindle at night.
Last night I listened to Radiolab. The hosts are two lovely NPR gentleman with polysyllabic names and poly cultural accents. I listened to BLISS. I'm sure you can find it.
The first segment was all about a gentleman named Mr.Bliss. He was born in 1908 in Germany I think it was. At any rate he had a varied youth and was a talented musician. He and his wife were living in Germany in 1938. He was sent to one of the death camps. He was very popular there he played instruments and taught subversive lyrics to the prisoners. Everyday all of the prisoners were marched outside to listen to hours of very loud propaganda speeches by Hitler and company. The more he listened he decided that language was easily manipulated to go from good to bad things. He thought there should be a method to keep language from changing. Eventually his German wife was able to get him a Visa and they went to China, which was the only country accepting Jews. They stayed there working to stay alive and eventually went to Australia. Once they settled there, Mr. Bliss decided that he would work on a dictionary that involved symbols and each symbol with represent a thought. Therefore no one could use the symbol as propaganda. Eventually Mr. Bliss completed his symbol dictionary and published it and mailed out 6000 copies and waited for the orders to roll in. No one ordered anything. After a while he gave up on his book. About 1970 a teacher in Canada was looking for something to help her class of cerebral palsy children learn to speak. She found the Bliss Symbols book, looked it over and checked it out. They started out slow with simple symbols and worked their way up. The kids were communicating. The teachers were able to sort them by smartest to who needed help, who was a leader, who needed leadership, etc. They were thrilled!. The teacher wrote a letter to Mr. Bliss about the success of his symbols. He was so thrilled that he traveled from Australia to Canada to see the students in action. When he got there he was thrilled at first and then when he saw that the symbols had evolved with additional symbols he was horrified. He objected that the modifications would lead eventually to them speaking English. The teacher said yes that was what they wanted. He objected strongly because to invent new dialects for the symbols would defeat the original purpose of elimination of language with use of the symbols.
I do not think he envisioned the symbols being spoken it was all mental. So there was a falling out, he sued the Canadian education system and eventually settled for $187,000.00 and that was pretty much the end of the use of Mr. Bliss symbols to help the cerebral palsy students speak. He wanted to prevent language being corrupted for war purposes and truly did not see the benefits of helping the cerebral palsy students.
Last night I listened to Radiolab. The hosts are two lovely NPR gentleman with polysyllabic names and poly cultural accents. I listened to BLISS. I'm sure you can find it.
The first segment was all about a gentleman named Mr.Bliss. He was born in 1908 in Germany I think it was. At any rate he had a varied youth and was a talented musician. He and his wife were living in Germany in 1938. He was sent to one of the death camps. He was very popular there he played instruments and taught subversive lyrics to the prisoners. Everyday all of the prisoners were marched outside to listen to hours of very loud propaganda speeches by Hitler and company. The more he listened he decided that language was easily manipulated to go from good to bad things. He thought there should be a method to keep language from changing. Eventually his German wife was able to get him a Visa and they went to China, which was the only country accepting Jews. They stayed there working to stay alive and eventually went to Australia. Once they settled there, Mr. Bliss decided that he would work on a dictionary that involved symbols and each symbol with represent a thought. Therefore no one could use the symbol as propaganda. Eventually Mr. Bliss completed his symbol dictionary and published it and mailed out 6000 copies and waited for the orders to roll in. No one ordered anything. After a while he gave up on his book. About 1970 a teacher in Canada was looking for something to help her class of cerebral palsy children learn to speak. She found the Bliss Symbols book, looked it over and checked it out. They started out slow with simple symbols and worked their way up. The kids were communicating. The teachers were able to sort them by smartest to who needed help, who was a leader, who needed leadership, etc. They were thrilled!. The teacher wrote a letter to Mr. Bliss about the success of his symbols. He was so thrilled that he traveled from Australia to Canada to see the students in action. When he got there he was thrilled at first and then when he saw that the symbols had evolved with additional symbols he was horrified. He objected that the modifications would lead eventually to them speaking English. The teacher said yes that was what they wanted. He objected strongly because to invent new dialects for the symbols would defeat the original purpose of elimination of language with use of the symbols.
I do not think he envisioned the symbols being spoken it was all mental. So there was a falling out, he sued the Canadian education system and eventually settled for $187,000.00 and that was pretty much the end of the use of Mr. Bliss symbols to help the cerebral palsy students speak. He wanted to prevent language being corrupted for war purposes and truly did not see the benefits of helping the cerebral palsy students.
3 comments:
Out of curiosity I googled cerebral palsy speech. And found quite a few articles regarding speech therapy focusing on diagnosing the brain injury and work on word exercises and pronunciation. Perhaps there has been so much progress in treatment that such modalities as Bliss Symbols would not be of much help.
I remembered part two of Bliss. Is was all about a young man born in Vermont 1880's who did not enjoy farming, he wanted a microscope for Christmas one year and he used it to study snowflakes. He then asked his parents for a camera and he photographed thousands of perfect individual snowflakes. Eventually those pictures were reprinted in books and other places. A meteorologist decided to take a look at his snow flakes and he never discovered a perfect snowflake. His were all lopsided, half melted. He had concluded that there was no such thing as a snowflake because they were always changing as they fell and he accused the first guy of manipulating his pictures. Two lives consumed with perfection, or not.
Merry Christmas, I do want to tell you that I do read your blog. I lurk. :)
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