Blissymbols Basic Vocabulary mug

Blissymbols is a constructed language devised in the 1940s by Charles K. Bliss as a utopian, culture- independent world language which was intended for use as an international auxiliary language (like Volapük, Esperanto, Ido, and Interlingua) in order to help prevent misunderstanding. Like other auxiliary languages, Charles Bliss’s invention failed to attract a wide enough following to achieve his philosophical and social goals. Despite this, Blissymbols was unique in comparison with other utopian languages, in that it was not a spoken language, but a visual and symbolic language. Blissymbols has no phonology per se, but is a truly ideographic language. In the early 1970's, a team at the Ontario Crippled Children’s Centre in Toronto, Canada (now known as the Holland Bloorview Kids Rehabilitation Hospital) discovered that Blissymbols could be used as a medium of communication for children with cerebral palsy who could not speak—yyet they could understand the speech of others and could learn to express their intentions, thoughts, dreams, opinions, feelings through Blissymbolics.