It was a dark and stormy night... and Karl Blitz, a WWII Austro-Hungarian refugee in the Shanghai Ghetto, invented a writing system that would eventually change special education forever.
Unbeknownst to him, his plan for developing a universal writing system had already been envisioned by Gottfried Liebniz in his idea of a Characteristica Universalis, some sort of ideographic language based on his rationalized interpretations of the Hànzì or Chinese Han writing system. However, both of them failed to realize, perhaps purposely, how the Chinese writing system (the so-called Traditional script) wasn't merely ideographic, but a mix of pictographic, indicative, and pictophonetic characters (among others).
Learn more about the Chinese writing system in my video: La escritura china (es fácil).
Taking this into account, let's go back to that dark and stormy night.
Karl Blitz, now known as Charles K. Bliss, took some elements from the Chinese traditional writing system, such as radicals and the ideographic elements of some characters and decided to work on creating a new, universal writing system, not based on representing the sounds of every language, but on their concepts.
*Spoiler alert!* Language and culture are inseparable. This means each culture will most probably have a definite set of core concepts not necessarily shared among other cultures. And that is a huge problem anytime we are designing something 'universal'. However, Charles Bliss went along the lines of 'Oh no! Anyway...' and spent several years working on turning his idea into reality. And from his genius work and dedication a new writing system called Bliss or Blissymbols was invented.
On the left: example of some common characters used to learn the basis of the Bliss writing system, where characters are formed by radicals conferring lexical value.
Once the writing system had been created, they found a problem. This system was used to help people with speech and intellectual impairment to write and read (yes, really) and the learning curve was not exactly as expected (well color me surprised) so they came up with a highly-functional way of making it easier to work with: colors!
And how do colors work? By assigning each of them a syntactic role:
Orange: Nouns
Yellow: People and personal pronouns
Green: Verbs
Blue: Adjectives
Pink/Purple: Social formulas
White/Colorless: Miscellaneous
But how is this useful?
By assigning a definite color to each syntactic role, students can recognise sentence structures faster and more easily, helping them approach the text more efficiently.
This color code has been applied to other writing and pictographic systems such as SPC or ARASAAC with positive results, and there is plenty of room for development depending on the needs of our students.
One example of color code modification is adding extra colors for particular differenciations (See photo below).
On the left we have an example of a color code modification. Orange has been used for nouns, while red has been applied to nouns referring to locations. This way we can create more complex sentences such as:
"SUBJECT does X in Y"
"The kid plays football in the park"
This particular example has been used with a student with dyslexia and ADHD during an Italian language lesson. After applying the color code modification, the student improved his abilities of creating new sentences applying the correct syntax. Further modifications were introduced, such as lighter and darker shades of colors: light, regular and dark green for infinitives and verbs conjugated in the 1st and 3rd person singular, dark purple for prepositions or dark blue for adverbs. After adding the color code changes the student improved notoriously and eventually started working without supervision.
On a road to color code standardization
For sure we as language teachers have used colors anytime we had the need to explain anything syntax-related to our students. We know it works because we have seen the moment of realization in their eyes time and again. Perhaps many of you eventually thought of using always the same colors for the same syntactic roles, but like many other ideas this one did not catch enough momentum to be fully developed and it fell into oblivion. It happens!
Here is my proposal: let us use this international color code every time we work with syntax. This way students with disabilities who have used AAC systems will have already one great tool to decipher new messages: an international color code.
On the one hand, being able to use a system they already know would benefit them greatly. On the other hand, we would be applying a functional approach that could potentially help everyone, not just in our particular classroom, but in every language classroom independently of who the teacher is.
Another small change with the potential to make a big impact.
It is definitely something to think about, right?
My personal color code modification Red: Locative (nouns of location)
Orange: Nouns
Yellow: People and personal pronouns
Light Green: Infinitive verbs
Green: 1st person singular
Dark Green: 3rd person singular
Blue: Adjectives
Dark Blue: Adverbs
Purple: Social formulas
Dark Purple: Prepositions
White/Colorless: Miscellaneous
References and further reading:
Blissymbolics Communications International. https://www.blissymbolics.org/
The fundamental rules of Blissymbolics: creating new Blissymbolics characters and vocabulary. Blissymbolics Communication International (BCI) (2004)
Crockford, D (2003): Introduction to Blissymbols.
Blissymbolics. Omniglot.
Blissymbolics resources. Symbols.net The World of Symbols.
Blissymbols grid (how Bliss symbols are structured) http://tecfa.unige.ch/guides/3dprinting/bliss/blisssym-grid.html
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