(The) scientist danced around (the) laboratory.
Start reading at the top-right.
In nonlinear Bliss, it is obvious that the "dancing legs" of "the scientist" are not separate "units" that need to be connected back together. No analysis needed.
Further, it is obvious that the space "around" "the laboratory" is already one with the laboratory, it never was a "unit" needing connection, but thanks anyway :-) And thank God the space-time continuum is still intact, Chomsky had me worried there!
The "THEs" were dropped because they were never there, they are meaningless.
Now, how would you rather study linguistics?
In Bliss or in English?
By the way, Chomsky was right,
the pieces do move around :)
Try it above!
Chomskian linguistics is like staring at an item of pottery that has been smashed on the ground, and saying, "What a wonderful and beautiful pattern! And how sophisticated the rules which put it together!" But there is no sophisticated logic there. Only some remaining patterns among the debris field.
So in nonlinear Bliss, instead of looking for patterns in a debris field (linear sentence) we go directly back to natural scenes for instruction in linguistics.
Arrows and a musical note show the dancing motion of the legs and feet of the scientist. And the legs are already attached, lucky for him :-) The arrows and musical note are near his feet and colored a lighter shade of the same color as the glyph of the scientist, to try and make it intuitively obvious what object they add information to. The glyph which means science is located near the top of the composite glyph for man, since science is in his head.
So in nonlinear Bliss, you can see how the elements of meaning are clustered together in a sentence. It's as if every glyph comes with a linguistic tree diagram built in, but this is only because it imitates reality far more closely than natural languages do. And the linear Bliss sentence displays how linear language deconstructs reality.
This page is a continuing introduction to a new concept and method for composing Blissymbolics lesson plans.
But it could equally be considered an exploration of potential new ways of introducing and teaching linguistics.
Neil Cohn, who I think is a genius in the linguistics of comic book imagery presented at the VaIL 2007 conference. He discussed Noam Chomsky's analysis of sentence structure with the example below. I thought it might be interesting to analyze this sentence using nonlinear Bliss, and see how the results compare.
First, let's see how Mr. Chomsky analyzes this sentence,
as Neil explained:
"In a linear sequence, the pieces can move around, but you have broad hierarchical connections. You have this lexicon of units that united with syntactic principles and entered into syntactic structures, which then outputted into the phonological structures and the semantic structures."
Basically, Chomsky's principles dictate that these "units" must be able to connect with each other. "The" must connect to "scientist", "around" must connect to "the" which must connect to "laboratory", and all of that must connect to "danced", and then all of that must connect to "the scientist" which have already connected with each other.
Wheeeeewwww! ;-O Can I sleep now?