Lessons in Blissymbolics

Lessons in Blissymbolics - Parsing

Related Pages: AAC Pictobabble Semantic Alphabet SuttonGlyphs

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Parsing is a fancy linguistic term for how words are grouped into meaningful sub-phrases within sentences and how those sub-phrases are combined into sentences. In other words if you're talking about a "green dog", where do the words "green" and "dog" get placed relative to each other?

If you want to say "the green dog jumped over the brown cow", you know which animal is green and which one is brown because the adjectives for color are placed immediately adjacent to the nouns they modify.

You wouldn't say "the dog and cow, green and brown, jumped over".

Not knowing the linguistic term for the previous ridiculous, confusing sentence, let's coin a new term for it: "fragmented parsing". So "fragmented parsing" will mean when a sentence or phrase has the parts(words) of its meaningful sub-phrases scattered around, breaking up all hope of intelligibility.

Officially, blissymbolics accepts all the various parsing methods represented in the world's languages. Each language group can use their own native parsing methods when writing blissymbolics.

But blissymbolics, being a visual language, often makes visible the parsing errors of natural languages which have accumulated during thousands of years of language change. Because a reader of blissymbolics can actually see the action of a sentence, she can more easily recognize when an action or object in the real world has been 'fragmented into parts and scattered' when represented by language.

In blissymbolics, parsing applies in three areas: within words (compound symbols), within sub-phrases (like 'green dog' or 'center of the storm'), and within sentences.

These lessons will recommend you try to avoid fragmented parsing.
But if this just fogs up your mind instead of helping you write in blissymbolics, then it's okay to just parse your blissymbols according to the way words flow in your native language.

Here's an example of fragmented parsing:

Where will you travel next?.

The two words in red represent just one action in the real world.
The English language fragments the verb in this sentence and separates its parts. To the degree any language does this, it creates a "small" illusion, that is, it doesn't faithfully represent the real world. In the real world "will" can't happen all by itself. You can have the future tense verbs "will travel" or "will help" or "will anything you want", but not just "will".

In blissymbolics, we have the following future tense verb indicator :
and it should be placed over the symbol that represents the action.

In this case it very clearly goes over the symbol for Journey :

to give us the future tense verb, will Travel :

Where you will travel next?

But if it makes you uncomfortable, the way the English or your native language sounds when you read the blissymbols to yourself, there is another way to write a sentence like this: