The Pasilalinic-sympathetic Alphabet

Have you ever looked at the letter ‘S’ and thought it looks a bit like a snake, and snakes hiss? Or that the letter ‘O’ mimics the shape your mouth makes when you say it? For most of the world’s writing systems, any connection between a letter’s shape and its sound is purely coincidental, a product of millennia of evolution from ancient pictograms. The link is arbitrary; we learn it by rote. But what if it wasn’t? What if we could design an alphabet from scratch where every curve, line, and dot was a direct, visual representation of the sound it stood for?

This was the utopian dream of Auguste de Plancy, a 19th-century Genevan amateur linguist. In 1869, he unveiled one of history’s most ambitious and beautifully logical failures: the Pasilalinic-sympathetic Alphabet.

A “Language-Speaking” Alphabet for All

The name itself is a mouthful, but it perfectly encapsulates its goal. “Pasilalinic” comes from Greek roots meaning “for all speech” (pasi-lalia). This was intended to be a universal script, capable of writing any language on Earth. The “sympathetic” part describes the core principle: the shapes of the letters would have a direct, or “sympathetic”, relationship with the sounds they represent, based on the actions of the human vocal tract.

In de Plancy’s vision, you wouldn’t just learn to read; you would see the sound. This was a product of the 19th-century obsession with universalism, logic, and scientific classification, an era that also gave us projects like Esperanto and Volapük. While those focused on creating a universal spoken language, de Plancy targeted the foundation: writing itself.

The Phonetic Blueprint: Seeing the Sound

So, how does one draw a sound? De Plancy broke it down with meticulous, almost surgical, precision. He created a system of base shapes and modifiers that corresponded to the two main categories of speech sounds: vowels and consonants.

The Simplicity of Vowels

Vowels are produced with a relatively open vocal tract, their distinct sounds created by the position of the tongue and the shape of the lips. De Plancy represented them with simple, elegant glyphs:

• A horizontal line ( — ) represented the /a/ sound (as in “father”), mimicking the open, flat position of the tongue.
• A vertical line ( | ) represented the /i/ sound (as in “machine”), perhaps symbolizing the high position of the tongue.
• A dot ( · ) represented the /u/ sound (as in “rule”), possibly for the small, rounded shape of the lips.

Other vowels were created by combining these core elements, creating a logical system for representing the vowel space.

Building Consonants, Piece by Piece

The real genius—and complexity—of the system lies with the consonants. De Plancy understood that consonants are defined by three key features:

1. Manner of Articulation: How is the air blocked? Is it a full stop (plosive), a noisy constriction (fricative), or through the nose (nasal)?
2. Place of Articulation: Where is the air blocked? With the lips (labial), the teeth (dental), or the back of the tongue (velar)?
3. Voicing: Are the vocal cords vibrating (voiced, like /b/) or not (voiceless, like /p/)?

De Plancy assigned a base shape to the manner of articulation. For example, a semicircle represented plosives (stops like /p/, /t/, /k/). A different shape, like a wave, might represent fricatives (hissing sounds like /s/, /f/).

To this base shape, he added modifiers for the place of articulation. Think of it like a phonetic LEGO set:

• The Base: Let’s take the semicircle for a plosive sound.
• The Modifier: A short line attached to it would indicate where it’s made. A line pointing down meant it was labial (made with the lips). A line pointing forward meant it was dental (made with the tongue and teeth). A line pointing up and back meant it was velar (made at the back of the mouth).

So, the letter for the voiceless plosive /p/ was a semicircle with a line pointing down (symbolizing the lips). The letter for /t/ was the same semicircle with a line pointing forward (for the teeth).

Finally, to distinguish between pairs like /p/ and /b/, or /t/ and /d/, he added a simple mark for voicing. A small dot or dash added to the /p/ glyph would transform it into the glyph for /b/, indicating the “buzz” of the vocal cords.

The result was a stunningly logical system. If you knew the rules, you could look at a character you’d never seen before and accurately deduce how to pronounce it. You could, in theory, write a word from any language by simply assembling these phonetic building blocks.

The Utopian Dream and the Harsh Reality

With such a brilliant, logical design, why aren’t we all writing in this “sympathetic” script today? The Pasilalinic-sympathetic Alphabet, for all its ingenuity, was doomed from the start.

The “Universal” Fallacy

The system was designed around the sounds of European languages. While comprehensive for its time, it had no way of elegantly handling the vast phonetic diversity of the world’s 7,000+ languages. How would it represent the clicks of Khoisan languages, the ejective consonants of the Caucasus, or the complex tonal systems of Southeast Asia and Africa? A truly universal system would need to be infinitely more complex, as demonstrated by the modern International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA).

The Illusion of Intuition

De Plancy’s greatest strength was also a weakness. While the system is perfectly logical, it is not necessarily intuitive. The idea that a downward line “sympathetically” represents the lips is itself an arbitrary rule that must be memorized. The user still has to learn a complex set of abstract rules mapping shapes to articulatory gestures. It replaces one set of arbitrary symbols (our ABCs) with another, more systematic, but far more complex set.

Practical and Cultural Hurdles

Even if the system were perfect, it faced insurmountable practical challenges. It would require a total overhaul of printing presses, education systems, and cultural traditions. Writing systems are deeply embedded in culture and identity. People are slow to abandon a familiar script, even a flawed one, for something alien—no matter how logical it claims to be.

A Beautiful Failure

The Pasilalinic-sympathetic Alphabet never gained a single follower. It remains a historical curiosity, a footnote in the annals of linguistics and constructed scripts. But to call it a simple failure is to miss the point.

It stands as a beautiful testament to human creativity and the enduring quest for perfect communication. It’s an artifact of a hopeful era when it was believed that the world’s problems could be solved through reason and elegant design. While its ambition outstripped its utility, de Plancy’s alphabet forces us to look at our own writing in a new light, to question the arbitrary nature of the symbols we use every day, and to appreciate the profound, complex, and beautifully messy relationship between sound, symbol, and meaning.