Examples of assonance, or a more general term, parachesis, the repetition of the same sound in several words in close succession (from simple:Nazi Party; Glossary of Nazi Germany; de:Sprache des Nationalsozialismus):
Dr. Weilgart witnessed some of the key events of the 20th century — Nazi Germany, the Korean War, the advent of modern psychology, America in the 60s and 70s, and the quest for peace that came out of that culture. His design, though completely unique and his own, is also very much a product of his complex life experience and education. Building on previous philosophers’ search for the basic categories of language, Weilgart set out to find a vehicle for thought that would not cloud over its relationship to reality, that was simple, intuitive, and universal. To create a language is no small task. A person must have a passion to do such a thing, and for Weilgart, the initial motivation came from the Nazi propaganda of his youth. He saw that words could easily lose their connection to reality and be used to persuade people to believe lies, scapegoat or focus hatred and even violence on another group of people. Sound familiar? He created aUI as a transparent medium with the hope that it would encourage critical thinking and the questioning of cliches and slogans.
Besides his education in philosophy and philology, Weilgart was later trained as a psychoanalyst, fourth in succession as student and analysand from Carl Jung’s position as analyst. His ideas about language were influenced by Jung’s ideas about the collective unconscious and universally shared symbols and archetypes. Jung believed that on a subconscious level, all of us share such key stories, symbols, and myths that we use to imagine and shape our way of thinking, and thus our lives.
Weilgart created aUI based on a similar idea — that there are some basic elements — the building blocks of thought and language — that are universal. He imagined aUI as a language of conscious space, a more evolved language that could help people become more conscious of their thinking through its design of inner harmony between sounds and symbols.
Weilgart followed other philosophers, including some well-known thinkers of the Renaissance, in search of fundamental “real” and “universal characters”, as they were referred to. It is an extensive history dating to the 17th century that is described by Umberto Eco in his book The Search for the Perfect Language (1995). Could a language be found that would resonate more exactly with reality? Well, who knows? But Weilgart devoted his life to trying.
If national language rallied people together into nations with battle cries, slogans, and commands, then Weilgart reasoned that language bound people with curses against the enemy, not with blessings of peace. Weilgart believed that we were conditioned over thousands of years to obey slogans in crises when people crave collective confidence. But in the modern age, slogans don’t usually serve as rallying cries against an outer, non-human enemy that hreatens death (as would be the case with for early humankind). Rather, they often serve as battle cries against competing rival groups, and thus push conventional language into commercial, bureaucratic, political, and militaristic domains.
Weilgart concluded that a slogan can absolutize (or make unconditional) a relative value into a focus of positive or negative action, an ultimate to die or kill for, (for example, the McCarthy era, anti-Communist slogan, “Better Dead than Red”). Such slogans work partly at a subconscious level, regressing from informative communication to the pre-rational command state of language. Alliteration and rhyme subvert reason. This is what Weilgart, as a young man, experienced firsthand as Hitler was coming to power: the pervasive Nazi propaganda, ominously regulated by the state to infiltrate agencies and education, beginning at primary grade levels, before reason is developed fully.
In particular, he observed how alliteration (use of the same first sound) and assonance (use of similar vowel sounds) emotionally empowered slogans, so that especially in the crowd-settings of mass public speeches, mob mentality or “crowd-think” could more easily over-take rational thought. For instance, the slogan Ein Volk, Ein Reich, Ein Führer! (“One People, One Nation, One Leader!”) contains not only the repeated ‘f’ sound of Volk (pronounced ‘Folk’) and Führer, and the ‘ei’ sounds in the three ‚ein‘ words and Reich, but Volk also sounds similar to the command ‘folg!’ (follow! = obey!). So the nation was subliminally commanded to follow the Führer (leader), who by similar sounding association would lead the defeated starving state to become Reich (a rich ruling empire – since the word has the double meaning of rich as well as empire). And the impoverished conditions were the fault of the scapegoated Jews, associated historically via Judas to all be traitors, evil, or even devils (Jude-Juda-Judas = traitor; Jew-Judah-Judas). Weilgart was committed to imagining and creating a language that might not allow for such manipulation.
In the same way, the Nazi’s motto, Blu-Bo – from “Blut und Boden” (Blood & Soil) is an alliteration such as ‘Soil & Soul’. The perverted analogy says, as soul and soil fit in sound, so they must fit in meaning: only those whose blood grew out of this soil have a ‘right’ to live on this soil (for only they have a soul). But, of course, the slogan confuses humans with plants.
It almost goes without saying that the Nazis were not the only ones to use language in this way. Even in peace time, slogans are used to bypass reasoning. In a study of 195 English advertising slogans, Piller (1997) found that some form of stylistic rhetorical device occurred in 65% of them: either assonance, consonance, alliteration, polysemy, repetition, parallelism, or rhyme. By far the majority were of assonance (70%), consonance (46%), and alliteration (35%).
Weilgart posited that while the conscious mind predominantly links synonyms, the subconscious – or mind compromised in some way by drowsiness, drugs, young age, or other conditions inhibiting lucid, rational thought – more easily associates assonances. Thinking back to the effect of slogans characterized by similar sounds, their use in crowd conditions under a fear-based mentality such as under Hitler’s manipulated mob manifestos, it is possible that these stylistic devices have a compounding effect on ‘thought’ in linking dangerous, disparate concepts through sound. Gordon Allport (1959) writes that “the homogenous behavior of the crowd is said to have a particular character — it is emotional and stupid...irrational.” (p. 843)
But even under normal, everyday conditions, Weilgart believed that the discrepancy between sound and meaning in conventional language set a possible obstacle to inner psychological harmony. This is the key concept motivating aUI’s design: to introduce a consistent relationship between sound, symbol, and meaning, so that words containing similar sounds (and hence similar symbols) also have a relation in meaning. When you play with the aUI symbols and sounds, see what you think. Do the relationships seem intuitive? Do they help you to remember the meanings?
The mainstream research area most closely related to this idea is referred to as cognitive lexical semantics and has been most intensively focused on by Drs. Anna Wierzbicka (1996) and Cliff Goddard (Australian National University) since the early ’70s. They call their analysis methodology a Natural Semantic Meta-language and currently have 61 primes, a third of which overlap with those of aUI. Their purpose, as Dr. Wierzbicka pointed out in a letter to Andrea Weilgart, differs from that of aUI. They are intent on cross-cultural analysis of any language’s word using this set of primes. aUI adds a morpheme (or symbol) and a phoneme (or sound) assigned to each prime. This makes it possible to organize the primes into more complex meanings for actual verbal communication. aUI could be considered an experiment in applied cognitive lexical semantics, with potential as an auxiliary language.
Beyond their primal and near-universal nature, these elementary concepts represent, in Weilgart’s view, the essential elements of a healthy human mind: “In the elements of meaning, the microcosm of the mind meets and mirrors the macrocosm of the universe” (Weilgart, 1979, p. LVI). He saw learning aUI, therefore, as an education into the essence of meaning, a therapeutic play that leads toward the ethos of mental health. He dreamt of offering youth another medium for creative self-expression in an effort to help dissolve destructive drives in our society. After learning a dozen languages and examining the process of linguistic expression of peoples from many cultures and continents, Weilgart reluctantly concluded that existing languages, even if combined or revised, could not meet his qualifications. He had no desire to add to the thousands of existing languages and dialects unless he could find a system singular enough to transcend traditional tongues that would therefore justify any heroic effort to learn yet another language. Aware of archetypes as Jung envisioned them – innate psychic structures that mysteriously guide our perceptions, Weilgart saw in these universal elements a potent clue to formulating a symbolic—yet less arbitrary—language.
- Allport, G., 1959, The historical background of modern social psychology.
- Eco, U., 1995. The Search for the Perfect Language. Blackwell Publishers, Ltd, Oxford.
- Pei, M., 1965. The Story of Language, Lippincott.
- Piller, I., 1997, Englische Werbeslogans. Anglia 115(2):193-222.
- Razran, G., 1961, The observable unconscious and the inferable conscious in current Soviet psychophysiology: interoceptive conditioning, semantic conditioning, and the orienting reflex. Psych. Review 68:81-147.
- Weilgart, W. J., 1979. aUI, The Language of Space, 4th Edition. Cosmic Communication Co., Decorah, Ia.
- Wierzbicka, A., 1996, Semantics: Primes and universals. Oxford University Press, UK.
- Heil Hitler! (healing, salvation, wholeness, safety – related to ‘hail’, Old English ‘health’) This was the ubiquitous alliterative greeting and lexification of the Führerprinzip, “leader principle”
- Ein Volk, Ein Reich, Ein Führer! (One people, One nation, One leader!), one of the most repeated slogans of the NSDAP
- Blut und Boden (Blood and Soil: only those whose blood grew out of this soil have a ‘right’ to live in this homeland, and should fight for the Fatherland).
- Die Juden sind unser Unglück! (The Jews are our misfortune!)
- Lang lebe unser ruhmvoller Führer! (Long live our glorious leader!)
- Meine Ehre heißt Treue (My honor means loyalty)
- Kinder, Küche, Kirche (Children, Kitchen, Church)
- All-Deutschland gegen All-Juda! (All-Germany against All-Jewry!)
- Arbeit macht Frei! (Work sets you free)
- Arbeit adelt (Labor ennobles)
- Volk ohne Raum (A people without space/room)
- White Pride, World Wide (adopted by neo-Nazi and white supremacist organizations)
- Kill the Kikes, Koons, and Katholics (slogan of the KKK)