Blissymbols
Encyclopedia
Blissymbols or Blissymbolics was conceived as an ideographic writing system called Semantography consisting of several hundred basic symbol
s, each representing a concept, which can be composed together to generate new symbols that represent new concepts. Blissymbols differ from most of the world's major writing systems in that the characters do not correspond at all to the sounds of any spoken language
.
(1897–1985), born Karl Kasiel Blitz in the Austro-Hungarian city of Czernowitz (at present the Ukrainian Чернівці), which had a mixture of different nationalities that “hated each other, mainly because they spoke and thought in different languages.”
Bliss graduated as a chemical engineer at the Vienna University of Technology
, and joined an electronics company as a research chemist.
As the German Army invaded Austria in 1938, he was sent to the concentration camps of Dachau and Buchenbald
. His German wife Claire managed to get him released, and they finally became exiles in Shanghai
, where Bliss had a cousin.
Bliss devised Blissymbols while a refugee at the Shanghai Ghetto
and Sydney
, from 1942 to 1949. He wanted to create an easy-to-learn international auxiliary language
to allow communication between different linguistic communities. He was inspired by Chinese character
s, with which he became familiar at Shanghai.
Bliss’s system was explained in his work Semantography (1949, 2nd ed. 1965, 3rd ed. 1978.)
It had several names:
As the “tourist explosion” took place in the 1960s, a number of researchers were looking for new standard symbols to be used at roads, stations, airports, etc. Bliss then adopted the name Blissymbolics in order that no researcher could plagiarize his system of symbols.
Since the 1960s/1970s, Blissymbols have become popular as a method to teach disabled or handicapped people to communicate.
In 1971 Shirley McNaughton started a pioneer program at the Ontario
Crippled Children’s Centre (OCCC), aimed to children with cerebral palsy
, from the approach of augmentative and alternative communication
(AAC). According to Arika Okrent, Bliss used to complain about the way the teachers at the OCCC were using the symbols, in relation with the proportions of the symbols and other questions: for example, they used “fancy” terms like “nouns” and “verbs”, to describe what Bliss called “things” and “actions”. (2009, p. 173-4).
The ultimate objective of the OCCC program was to use Blissymbols as a practical way to teach the children to express themselves in their mother tongue, since the Blissymbols provided visual keys to understand the meaning of the English words, especially the abstract words.
In his work Semantography Bliss had not provided a systematic set of definitions for his symbols (there was a provisional vocabulary index instead (1965, pp. 827-67)), so McNaughton’s team might often interpret a certain symbol in a way that Bliss would later criticize as a “misinterpretation”. For example, they might interpret a tomato as a vegetable –according to the English definition of tomato- even though the ideal Blissymbol of vegetable was restricted by Bliss to just vegetables growing underground. Eventually the OCCC staff modified and adapted Bliss’s system in order to make it serve as a bridge to English. (2009, p. 189) Bliss complaints about his symbols “being abused” by the OCCC became so intense that the director of the OCCC told Bliss, on his 1974 visit, never to come back. In spite of this, in 1975 Bliss granted an exclusive world license, for use with handicapped children, to the new Blissymbolics Communication Foundation directed by Shirley McNaughton (later called Blissymbolics Communication International, BCI). Nevertheless, in 1977 Bliss claimed that this agreement was violated so that he was deprived of effective control of his symbol system.
According to Okrent (2009, p. 190), there was a final period of conflict, as Bliss would make continuous criticisms to McNaughton often followed by apologizes. Bliss finally brought his lawyers back to the OCCC, and both parts reached a settlement:
Blissymbolic Communication International now claims an exclusive license from Bliss, for the use and publication of Blissymbols for persons with communication, language and learning difficulties.
The Blissymbol method has been used is Canada, Sweden, and a few other countries. Practitioners of Blissymbolics (that is, speech and language therapists and users) maintain that some users who have learned to communicate with Blissymbolics find it easier to learn to read and write traditional orthography in the local spoken language than do users who did not know Blissymbolics.
So, whether Blissymbolics constitutes an unspoken language is a controversial question, whatever its practical utility may be. Some linguists, such as John DeFrancis
and J. Marshall Unger
have argued that genuine ideographic writing systems with the same capacities as natural language
s do not exist.
, whose Essay Concerning Human Understanding prevented people from the “vague and insignificant forms of speech” that usually pass for “deep learning”, yet they rather cause ignorance and keep people away from true knowledge.
Another vital referent is Leibnitz’s project of an ideographic language called "universal character
", 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”, as well as adding “certain additional marks, suitable to make understood the flexions and the particles.” (1965, p. 569). Bliss stated that his own work was an attempt to take up the thread of Leibnitz’s project.
Finally there is a strong influence by the work The Meaning of Meaning
of Ogden and Richards , 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 angle; the meaning that we know by experience (our implicit definition of the thing), at the top angle; and the physical word that we speak or write, at the left angle. 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.
When a symbol is not marked by any of the three grammar symbols (square, cone, inverted cone), they may be a non material thing, a grammatical particle, etc.
It combines the symbol for "writing tool" or "pen" (a line inclined, as a pen being used) with the symbol for "world", which in its turn combines "ground" or "earth" (a horizontal line below) and its counterpart derivate "sky" (a horizontal line above). Thus the world would be seen as "what is among the ground and the sky", and "Blissymbols" would be seen as "the writing tool to express the world".
This is clearly distinct from the symbol of "language", which is a combination of "mouth" and "ear". Thus natural languages are mainly oral, while Blissymbols is just a writing system dealing with semantics, not phonetics.
This sentence means "I want to go to the cinema." This example shows several features of Blissymbolics:
) in Toronto
, Canada. Since it was important that the children see consistent pictures, OCCC had a draftsman named Jim Grice draw the symbols. Both Charles K. Bliss and Margrit Beesley at the OCCC worked with Grice to ensure consistency. In 1975, a new organization named Blissymbolics Communication Foundation directed by Shirley McNaughton led this effort. Over the years, this organization changed its name to Blissymbolics Communication Institute, Easter Seal Communication Institute, and ultimately to Blissymbolics Communication International (BCI).
BCI is an international group of people who act as an authority regarding the standardization
of the Blissymbolics language. It has taken responsibility for any extensions of the Blissymbolics language as well as any maintenance needed for the language. BCI has coordinated usage of the language since 1971 for augmentative and alternative communication. BCI received a licence and copyright through legal agreements with Charles K. Bliss in 1975 and 1982. Limiting the count of Bliss-characters (there are currently about 900) is very useful in order to help the user community. It also helps when implementing Blissymbolics using technology such as computers.
In 1991, BCI published a reference guide containing 2300 vocabulary items and detailed rules for the graphic design of additional characters, so they settled a first set of approved Bliss-words for general use.
The Standards council of Canada then sponsored, on January 21, 1993, the registration of an encoded character set for use in ISO/IEC 2022, in the ISO-IR international registry of coded character sets.
After many years of requests, the Blissymbolic language was finally approved as an encoded language, with code zbl, into the ISO 639-2
and ISO 639-3
standards.
A proposal was posted by Michael Everson
for the Blissymbolics script to be included in the Universal Character Set
(UCS) and encoded for use with the ISO/IEC 10646 and Unicode
standards. BCI would cooperate with the Unicode Technical Committee (UTC) and the ISO Working Group.
The proposed encoding does not use the lexical encoding model used in the existing ISO-IR/169 registered character set, but instead applies the Unicode and ISO character-glyph model to the Bliss-character model already adopted by BCI, since this would significantly reduce the number of needed characters. Bliss-characters can now be used in a creative way to create many new arbitrary concepts, by surrounding the invented words with special Bliss indicators (similar to punctuation), something which was not possible in the ISO-IR/169 encoding.
However, at the end of 2009, the Blissymbolic script is still not encoded in the UCS. Some questions are still unanswered, such as the inclusion in the BCI repertoire of some characters (currently about 24) that are already encoded in the UCS (like digits, punctuation signs, spaces and some markers), but whose unification may cause problems due to the very strict graphical layouts required by the published Bliss reference guides. In addition, the character metrics use a specific layout where the usual baseline is not used, and the ideographic em-square is not relevant for Bliss character designs, that use additional "earth line" and "sky line" to define the composition square.
Some fonts supporting the BCI repertoire are available and usable with texts encoded with private-use assignments (PUA) within the UCS. But only the private BCI encoding based on ISO-IR/169 registration is available for text interchange.
Symbol
A symbol is something which represents an idea, a physical entity or a process but is distinct from it. The purpose of a symbol is to communicate meaning. For example, a red octagon may be a symbol for "STOP". On a map, a picture of a tent might represent a campsite. Numerals are symbols for...
s, each representing a concept, which can be composed together to generate new symbols that represent new concepts. Blissymbols differ from most of the world's major writing systems in that the characters do not correspond at all to the sounds of any spoken language
Spoken language
Spoken language is a form of human communication in which words derived from a large vocabulary together with a diverse variety of names are uttered through or with the mouth. All words are made up from a limited set of vowels and consonants. The spoken words they make are stringed into...
.
History
Blissymbols were invented by Charles K. BlissCharles K. Bliss
Charles K. Bliss was a chemical engineer and semiotician, inventor of Blissymbolics. He was born in Austria, and got the Australian citizenship.-Early life:...
(1897–1985), born Karl Kasiel Blitz in the Austro-Hungarian city of Czernowitz (at present the Ukrainian Чернівці), which had a mixture of different nationalities that “hated each other, mainly because they spoke and thought in different languages.”
Bliss graduated as a chemical engineer at the Vienna University of Technology
Vienna University of Technology
Vienna University of Technology is one of the major universities in Vienna, the capital of Austria. Founded in 1815 as the "Imperial-Royal Polytechnic Institute" , it currently has about 26,200 students , 8 faculties and about 4,000 staff members...
, and joined an electronics company as a research chemist.
As the German Army invaded Austria in 1938, he was sent to the concentration camps of Dachau and Buchenbald
Buchenwald concentration camp
Buchenwald concentration camp was a German Nazi concentration camp established on the Ettersberg near Weimar, Germany, in July 1937, one of the first and the largest of the concentration camps on German soil.Camp prisoners from all over Europe and Russia—Jews, non-Jewish Poles and Slovenes,...
. His German wife Claire managed to get him released, and they finally became exiles in Shanghai
Shanghai
Shanghai is the largest city by population in China and the largest city proper in the world. It is one of the four province-level municipalities in the People's Republic of China, with a total population of over 23 million as of 2010...
, where Bliss had a cousin.
Bliss devised Blissymbols while a refugee at the Shanghai Ghetto
Shanghai ghetto
The Shanghai ghetto, formally known as the , was an area of approximately one square mile in the Hongkou District of Japanese-occupied Shanghai, to which about 20,000 Jewish refugees were relocated by the Japanese-issued Proclamation Concerning Restriction of Residence and Business of Stateless...
and Sydney
Sydney
Sydney is the most populous city in Australia and the state capital of New South Wales. Sydney is located on Australia's south-east coast of the Tasman Sea. As of June 2010, the greater metropolitan area had an approximate population of 4.6 million people...
, from 1942 to 1949. He wanted to create an easy-to-learn international auxiliary language
International auxiliary language
An international auxiliary language or interlanguage is a language meant for communication between people from different nations who do not share a common native language...
to allow communication between different linguistic communities. He was inspired by Chinese character
Chinese character
Chinese characters are logograms used in the writing of Chinese and Japanese , less frequently Korean , formerly Vietnamese , or other languages...
s, with which he became familiar at Shanghai.
Bliss’s system was explained in his work Semantography (1949, 2nd ed. 1965, 3rd ed. 1978.)
It had several names:
As the “tourist explosion” took place in the 1960s, a number of researchers were looking for new standard symbols to be used at roads, stations, airports, etc. Bliss then adopted the name Blissymbolics in order that no researcher could plagiarize his system of symbols.
Since the 1960s/1970s, Blissymbols have become popular as a method to teach disabled or handicapped people to communicate.
In 1971 Shirley McNaughton started a pioneer program at the Ontario
Ontario
Ontario is a province of Canada, located in east-central Canada. It is Canada's most populous province and second largest in total area. It is home to the nation's most populous city, Toronto, and the nation's capital, Ottawa....
Crippled Children’s Centre (OCCC), aimed to children with cerebral palsy
Cerebral palsy
Cerebral palsy is an umbrella term encompassing a group of non-progressive, non-contagious motor conditions that cause physical disability in human development, chiefly in the various areas of body movement....
, from the approach of augmentative and alternative communication
Augmentative and alternative communication
Augmentative and alternative communication is an umbrella term that encompasses the communication methods used to supplement or replace speech or writing for those with impairments in the production or comprehension of spoken or written language...
(AAC). According to Arika Okrent, Bliss used to complain about the way the teachers at the OCCC were using the symbols, in relation with the proportions of the symbols and other questions: for example, they used “fancy” terms like “nouns” and “verbs”, to describe what Bliss called “things” and “actions”. (2009, p. 173-4).
The ultimate objective of the OCCC program was to use Blissymbols as a practical way to teach the children to express themselves in their mother tongue, since the Blissymbols provided visual keys to understand the meaning of the English words, especially the abstract words.
In his work Semantography Bliss had not provided a systematic set of definitions for his symbols (there was a provisional vocabulary index instead (1965, pp. 827-67)), so McNaughton’s team might often interpret a certain symbol in a way that Bliss would later criticize as a “misinterpretation”. For example, they might interpret a tomato as a vegetable –according to the English definition of tomato- even though the ideal Blissymbol of vegetable was restricted by Bliss to just vegetables growing underground. Eventually the OCCC staff modified and adapted Bliss’s system in order to make it serve as a bridge to English. (2009, p. 189) Bliss complaints about his symbols “being abused” by the OCCC became so intense that the director of the OCCC told Bliss, on his 1974 visit, never to come back. In spite of this, in 1975 Bliss granted an exclusive world license, for use with handicapped children, to the new Blissymbolics Communication Foundation directed by Shirley McNaughton (later called Blissymbolics Communication International, BCI). Nevertheless, in 1977 Bliss claimed that this agreement was violated so that he was deprived of effective control of his symbol system.
According to Okrent (2009, p. 190), there was a final period of conflict, as Bliss would make continuous criticisms to McNaughton often followed by apologizes. Bliss finally brought his lawyers back to the OCCC, and both parts reached a settlement:
Blissymbolic Communication International now claims an exclusive license from Bliss, for the use and publication of Blissymbols for persons with communication, language and learning difficulties.
The Blissymbol method has been used is Canada, Sweden, and a few other countries. Practitioners of Blissymbolics (that is, speech and language therapists and users) maintain that some users who have learned to communicate with Blissymbolics find it easier to learn to read and write traditional orthography in the local spoken language than do users who did not know Blissymbolics.
The speech question
Unlike similar constructed languages like aUI, Blissymbolics was conceived as a purely visual, speech-less language, on the premise that “interlinguistic communication is mainly carried on by reading and writing”. Nevertheless, Bliss suggested that a set of international words could be adopted, so that “a kind of spoken language could be established – as a travelling aid only”. (1965, p. 89-90).So, whether Blissymbolics constitutes an unspoken language is a controversial question, whatever its practical utility may be. Some linguists, such as John DeFrancis
John DeFrancis
John DeFrancis was an American linguist, sinologist, author of Chinese language textbooks, lexicographer of Chinese dictionaries, and Professor Emeritus of Chinese Studies at the University of Hawaii at Mānoa....
and J. Marshall Unger
J. Marshall Unger
James Marshall Unger, , is a professor of Japanese at Ohio State University who specializes in historical linguistics and the writing systems of East Asia.- Works :...
have argued that genuine ideographic writing systems with the same capacities as natural language
Natural language
In the philosophy of language, a natural language is any language which arises in an unpremeditated fashion as the result of the innate facility for language possessed by the human intellect. A natural language is typically used for communication, and may be spoken, signed, or written...
s do not exist.
Semantics
Bliss’s deep concern about semantics finds an early referent in John LockeJohn Locke
John Locke FRS , widely known as the Father of Liberalism, was an English philosopher and physician regarded as one of the most influential of Enlightenment thinkers. Considered one of the first of the British empiricists, following the tradition of Francis Bacon, he is equally important to social...
, whose Essay Concerning Human Understanding prevented people from the “vague and insignificant forms of speech” that usually pass for “deep learning”, yet they rather cause ignorance and keep people away from true knowledge.
Another vital referent is Leibnitz’s project of an ideographic language called "universal character
Characteristica universalis
The Latin term characteristica universalis, commonly interpreted as universal characteristic, or universal character in English, is a universal and formal language imagined by the German philosopher Gottfried Leibniz able to express mathematical, scientific, and metaphysical concepts...
", 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”, as well as adding “certain additional marks, suitable to make understood the flexions and the particles.” (1965, p. 569). Bliss stated that his own work was an attempt to take up the thread of Leibnitz’s project.
Finally there is a strong influence by the work The Meaning of Meaning
The Meaning of Meaning
Although the original text was published in 1923 it has been used as a textbook in many fields including linguistics, philosophy, language, cognitive science and most recently semantics. The book has been in print continuously since 1923. The most recent edition is the critical edition prepared...
of Ogden and Richards , 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 angle; the meaning that we know by experience (our implicit definition of the thing), at the top angle; and the physical word that we speak or write, at the left angle. 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.
Grammar
The grammar of Blissymbols is based on a certain interpretation of nature, dividing it into matter (material things), energy (actions), and human values (mental evaluations). In an ordinary language, these would give place respectively to substantives, verbs, and adjectives. In Blissymbols, they are marked respectively by a small square symbol, a small cone symbol, and a small V or inverted cone. These symbols may be placed above any other symbol, turning it respectively into a “thing”, an “action”, and an “evaluation”:When a symbol is not marked by any of the three grammar symbols (square, cone, inverted cone), they may be a non material thing, a grammatical particle, etc.
Examples
This symbol represents the expression "world language", which was a first tentative name for Blissymbols.It combines the symbol for "writing tool" or "pen" (a line inclined, as a pen being used) with the symbol for "world", which in its turn combines "ground" or "earth" (a horizontal line below) and its counterpart derivate "sky" (a horizontal line above). Thus the world would be seen as "what is among the ground and the sky", and "Blissymbols" would be seen as "the writing tool to express the world".
This is clearly distinct from the symbol of "language", which is a combination of "mouth" and "ear". Thus natural languages are mainly oral, while Blissymbols is just a writing system dealing with semantics, not phonetics.
This sentence means "I want to go to the cinema." This example shows several features of Blissymbolics:
- The pronoun "I" is formed of the symbol for "person" and the number 1 (the first person). Using the number 2 would give the symbol for singular "You"; adding the plural indicator (a small cross at the top) would produce the pronouns "We" and plural "You".
- The symbol for "to want" contains the heart which symbolizes feeling and the verb indicator at the top.
- The symbol for "to go" is composed of the leg symbol and the verb indicator.
- The symbol for "movie theater" is composed of the symbols for "house" and "film"; "film" in turn is composed of "camera" and the arrow.
Towards the international standardization of the script
As told above, Blissymbolics was used in 1971 to help children at the Ontario Crippled Children’s Centre (OCCC, now the Bloorview Kids RehabBloorview Kids Rehab
Holland Bloorview Kids Rehabilitation Hospital is Canada's largest children's rehabilitation hospital. It is located in Toronto, Ontario, Canada...
) in Toronto
Toronto
Toronto is the provincial capital of Ontario and the largest city in Canada. It is located in Southern Ontario on the northwestern shore of Lake Ontario. A relatively modern city, Toronto's history dates back to the late-18th century, when its land was first purchased by the British monarchy from...
, Canada. Since it was important that the children see consistent pictures, OCCC had a draftsman named Jim Grice draw the symbols. Both Charles K. Bliss and Margrit Beesley at the OCCC worked with Grice to ensure consistency. In 1975, a new organization named Blissymbolics Communication Foundation directed by Shirley McNaughton led this effort. Over the years, this organization changed its name to Blissymbolics Communication Institute, Easter Seal Communication Institute, and ultimately to Blissymbolics Communication International (BCI).
BCI is an international group of people who act as an authority regarding the standardization
Standardization
Standardization is the process of developing and implementing technical standards.The goals of standardization can be to help with independence of single suppliers , compatibility, interoperability, safety, repeatability, or quality....
of the Blissymbolics language. It has taken responsibility for any extensions of the Blissymbolics language as well as any maintenance needed for the language. BCI has coordinated usage of the language since 1971 for augmentative and alternative communication. BCI received a licence and copyright through legal agreements with Charles K. Bliss in 1975 and 1982. Limiting the count of Bliss-characters (there are currently about 900) is very useful in order to help the user community. It also helps when implementing Blissymbolics using technology such as computers.
In 1991, BCI published a reference guide containing 2300 vocabulary items and detailed rules for the graphic design of additional characters, so they settled a first set of approved Bliss-words for general use.
The Standards council of Canada then sponsored, on January 21, 1993, the registration of an encoded character set for use in ISO/IEC 2022, in the ISO-IR international registry of coded character sets.
After many years of requests, the Blissymbolic language was finally approved as an encoded language, with code zbl, into the ISO 639-2
ISO 639-2
ISO 639-2:1998, Codes for the representation of names of languages — Part 2: Alpha-3 code, is the second part of the ISO 639 standard, which lists codes for the representation of the names of languages. The three-letter codes given for each language in this part of the standard are referred to as...
and ISO 639-3
ISO 639-3
ISO 639-3:2007, Codes for the representation of names of languages — Part 3: Alpha-3 code for comprehensive coverage of languages, is an international standard for language codes in the ISO 639 series. The standard describes three‐letter codes for identifying languages. It extends the ISO 639-2...
standards.
A proposal was posted by Michael Everson
Michael Everson
Michael Everson is a linguist, script encoder, typesetter, and font designer. His central area of expertise is with writing systems of the world, specifically in the representation of these systems in formats for computer and digital media...
for the Blissymbolics script to be included in the Universal Character Set
Universal Character Set
The Universal Character Set , defined by the International Standard ISO/IEC 10646, Information technology — Universal multiple-octet coded character set , is a standard set of characters upon which many character encodings are based...
(UCS) and encoded for use with the ISO/IEC 10646 and Unicode
Unicode
Unicode is a computing industry standard for the consistent encoding, representation and handling of text expressed in most of the world's writing systems...
standards. BCI would cooperate with the Unicode Technical Committee (UTC) and the ISO Working Group.
The proposed encoding does not use the lexical encoding model used in the existing ISO-IR/169 registered character set, but instead applies the Unicode and ISO character-glyph model to the Bliss-character model already adopted by BCI, since this would significantly reduce the number of needed characters. Bliss-characters can now be used in a creative way to create many new arbitrary concepts, by surrounding the invented words with special Bliss indicators (similar to punctuation), something which was not possible in the ISO-IR/169 encoding.
However, at the end of 2009, the Blissymbolic script is still not encoded in the UCS. Some questions are still unanswered, such as the inclusion in the BCI repertoire of some characters (currently about 24) that are already encoded in the UCS (like digits, punctuation signs, spaces and some markers), but whose unification may cause problems due to the very strict graphical layouts required by the published Bliss reference guides. In addition, the character metrics use a specific layout where the usual baseline is not used, and the ideographic em-square is not relevant for Bliss character designs, that use additional "earth line" and "sky line" to define the composition square.
Some fonts supporting the BCI repertoire are available and usable with texts encoded with private-use assignments (PUA) within the UCS. But only the private BCI encoding based on ISO-IR/169 registration is available for text interchange.
External links
- Blissymbolics.us, Blissymbolics Resources including lessons, phrases, dictionary etc.
- An Introduction to Blissymbols (PDF file)
- Standard two-byte encoded character set for Blissymbols, from the ISO-IR international registry of character sets, registration number 169 (1993-01-21).
- Michael EversonMichael EversonMichael Everson is a linguist, script encoder, typesetter, and font designer. His central area of expertise is with writing systems of the world, specifically in the representation of these systems in formats for computer and digital media...
's First proposed encoding into Unicode and ISO/IEC 10646 of Blissymbolics characters, based on the decomposition of the ISO-IR/169 repertoire.