About Us

Andrea Weilgart Patten, Director

As my father’s older daughter, I’ve always felt I inherited this luminous–but languishing–linguistic legacy to carry forward. Growing up, it was a heavy perceived responsibility, and one I didn’t necessarily welcome.  But after years of doing my own thing, it feels like a unique, incredible opportunity.

Now, I’m grateful for all the times my sister Lindy and I were expected to attend my father’s Monday night seminar in the ‘Psychology of Communication’ (aka, The Language of Space).  It seemed embarrassingly radical and far-out to me.  But it was the late 60s and early 70s, after all, so I could have spared myself the uneasiness with our image.  The class began as meetings in our humble, 2-bedroom home, with the two of us as the symbol-savvy chalk-board champs! My favorite part was playing the aUI-English word creation-guessing game with the grown-up students (two of them who are with me now on the Board of Cosmic Communication Foundation). It was fun coming up with original aUI combos, especially when they were actually understood. Years later, I see those meetings as ‘radical’ in its other definition — referring to the root, as in the root meaning. Now I see it as our search for that elusive fundamental meaning — getting back to the roots of linguistic meaning, which we share, who knows…..with most all other human languages?  Could human cultures have in common some set of  root concepts — the essential elements that allow us as rational beings to formulate our inexorable thoughts into words?

Another part of the classes I remember enjoying was the guided meditation my father often lead at the conclusion of the class. In a way, it allowed us to sense an existence that transcended this one, at least one that freed us from the constraints of any human communication. Perhaps aUI would lend itself best as a vehicle for spiritual truth.

At 14, I learned the German/English shorthand which my father used for all his envelope notes and writing.  There were dozens of manuscript filled three-ring binders that initially my mother, then I, and eventually my sister were to type. My mother was busy enough taking care of the book work and mail-order business.

In 2001 I attended the Linguistics Society of America’s summer institute and took three upper level and graduate classes in semantics. One was specifically in ‘cognitive lexical semantics’ – the closest linguistic area of study I could find related to the structure of aUI. In an essay for this class, I gave a comparison of ‘Natural Semantic Meta-language’ explications of the German adjective gemütlich with formulations in aUI. I concluded, “Perhaps the Language of Space, even in its current simple form, may make possible the separation and exposition of semantic molecules within a word’s meaning. The use of ideographic morphemes facilitates the manipulation of semantic units.” This is as opposed to what I found to be the quite cumbersome, but popular, NSM method.  I don’t think the professor was amused.

Over the years, I’ve had a complicated relationship to my father’s constructed language, but I believe now that there is much to learn from it — most especially the possibilities it gives us for delving into the mystery of meaning at its essence, embarking on an experimental venture to see how far the simplest of semantic forms can take us in the creation of a new vehicle of communication….and therefore of thought.  I hope you will enjoy your explorations! Thanks for your interest.