Editing Blissymbols (section)

== Semantics ==
{{See also|Transfer (propaganda)}}

Bliss' concern about [[semantics]] finds an early referent in [[John Locke]],<ref>Locke, J. (1690). ''An Essay Concerning Human Understanding''. London.</ref> whose ''[[Essay Concerning Human Understanding]]'' prevented people from those "vague and insignificant forms of speech" that may give the impression of being deep learning.

Another vital referent is [[Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz]]'s project of an ideographic language "[[characteristica universalis]]", based on the principles of Chinese characters. It would contain small figures representing "visible things by their lines, and the invisible, by the visible which accompany them", adding "certain additional marks, suitable to make understood the flexions and the particles."<ref name="Bliss" />{{rp|569}} Bliss stated that his own work was an attempt to take up the thread of Leibniz's project.

Finally there is a strong influence by ''[[The Meaning of Meaning]]'' (1923) by [[C. K. Ogden]] and [[I. A. Richards]],<ref>C. K. Ogden & I. A. Richard (1923). ''The meaning of meaning; a study of the influence of language upon thought and of the science of symbolism''. London: K. Paul, Trench, Trubner & co., ltd; New York, Harcourt, Brace & company, inc. LC: 23009064.</ref> which was considered a standard work on semantics. Bliss found especially useful their "triangle of reference": the physical thing or "referent" that we perceive would be represented at the right vertex; the meaning that we know by experience (our implicit definition of the thing), at the top vertex; and the physical word that we speak or symbol we write, at the left vertex. The reversed process would happen when we read or listen to words: from the words, we recall meanings, related to referents which may be real things or unreal "fictions". Bliss was particularly concerned with political propaganda, whose discourses would tend to contain words that correspond to unreal or ambiguous referents.{{citation needed|date=March 2022}}