Semantography (World Writing): creating the World Writing
Charles began working on his World Writing in September, 1942. While he leaves little information on the process of creating symbols, it appears that, initially at least, it was a form of recreation after a hard day's work. It was also a distraction.
It was a fascinating idea. There were the sometimes unbearable blackout nights, the fall of bombs, the uncertainty, the anxiety about the tomorrow, the air raids. I thought it a good idea to keep my mind occupied in the evenings with a fascinating toy. And in the beginning I toyed only with it. (SB 218)
In this first creative phase Charles worked alone, probably with several dictionaries at hand. His first task would have been to create the rules that would govern his system, rules which continue to this day. He also started with symbols that were simpler and more straight forward, such as chair and house. He worked until he felt his system was robust enough to present to the world, which he did at his first public lecture in February, 1943.
Charles was also very well-read and studied publications on symbols. How much of this research was done in Shanghai versus Sydney is not known, but he was doing research throughout this creative period. As an example:
The Records of Prehistoric Man. In my search for pictorial presentation I was of course much interested in the pictorial writings of old and I studied the early writing of the Chinese, Babylonians, Egyptians, etc. until I arrived at the cave paintings of paleolithic man, estimated by the archeologists of having been painted 30,000 to 50,000 B.C.(SS 123-7)
Here is another example of Charles' search for a symbol for "Life" , an exerpt from Semantography Series 125.
The Symbol for Life. When I began to think about an adequate symbol for this meaning I started to look up all the books on biology I could lay my hands on. I wanted to know how far progressed Biology is with regard to an adequate explanation of this phenomenon. I consequently looked through reams and reams of books and books, but could not find a simple explanation...(SS 125-2)
The work begins
My study of the Chinese Character Writing has enchanted me completely, especially the extraordinary possibilities of a non-alphabetical hieroglyphic writing, possessing that tremendous advantage that it can be read by different nations, who speak different languages. I believe that this accounts to some extent for the fact that the great nations of East Asia, although composed of different races, are tied together by a common classical literature and cultural traditions simply because they can learn and read in their own language the meaning of the written characters. (SS 102-2)
Imagine the incredible aspect that such a character writing had been applied in Europe and that a book or a newspaper written and printed in Greece, for instance, could be read by any Frenchman, Dane, Italian or by a man knowing only Bascian dialect used in a small Spanish province. Or imagine that Moliere, Goethe, Shakespeare, Dante and all other great men would have written their immortal works in a character writing, which everybody in Europe, no matter what his language was, could read and appreciate. How much more mutual understanding would have been achieved in the world and how much misunderstanding would have been avoided! (SB 218)
But let us go back to facts more real, sober and. businesslike. If such an international Character Writing would exist, which must be very easy to acquire, it would be possible that, let us say, a Swede could write a business letter to a man in Buenos Aires who speaks only Spanish, and the latter could pass on the letter to a Portuguese who knows only his language, but they all could read the same letter in their own language. Moreover, any book printed in this new writing could be read everywhere in the world. (SB 218)
This fantastic idea simply took my breath away, and I started the work in September, 1942. I realized that Chinese Character writing could not be applied as its knowledge is very difficult to acquire for a foreigner owing to the fact that the original simple characters have changed their appearance through ages to such an extent that the result today is often a very complicated system of many strokes and pictures, in which the original meaning is very often impossible to trace. (SB 218)
A new international character writing must be extraordinary simple, and the meaning must be expressed by the picture itself. This seemed to me simply an impossible task. Try to express in a pictorial form by a few strokes "Consciousness" or "Education". I started therefore the work merely playing with it. Very soon, however, I discovered that when using a definite system and a few rules of Chinese writing, the matter is not so difficult at all. Then it occurred to me that my new writing would be writable on a typewriter. I imagined, of course, in the beginning a monster typewriter with hundreds of keys like one used for Chinese with about 2500 characters. (SB 218)
My amazement grew with every evening as I continued my work, and I was completely and jubilantly knocked out, when I figured out how many hundreds of keys my new typewriter should have. Reducing all my characters to their simple elements, I found out to my astonishment that only 28 keys all in all (with a little adjustment of the typewriter) would be necessary to express more than 7500 different words. Now, an ordinary typewriter has 42 keys. If I discarded the capital letters, I would have a typewriter capable to write my new international character writing and would also have the complete alphabet in small letters, numbers, marks, etc. (SS 102-3)