6 ms·
Will emoji become a new language?
- cbowal 11y agoA classic example of Betteridge's Law of Headlines. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge%27s_law_of_headlines https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge%27s_law_of_headline...
- V-2 11y agoA bit of click-baiting here, however it is quite interesting how long before :) or ;) etc. become widely accepted eg. in newspapers (assuming that newspapers don't go extinct first).
- PMan74 11y ago> eg. in newspapers http://www.theguardian.com/media/2015/oct/12/us-todays-facebook-emojis-twitter http://www.theguardian.com/media/2015/oct/12/us-todays-faceb...
- teekert 11y agoI want news in news papers, not the associated emotions of the journalist. Emotions should be kept far away from news, anything subjective should be. Maybe it would work for certain magazines? Still, adding a crying face to a sentence like "Susan lost her first 5 babies" seems horribly inappropriate, this can change of course.
- johnchristopher 11y ago> Emotions should be kept far away from news, (..) Yes. > (continued) anything subjective should be. No.
- V-2 11y agoSubjective is fine, but good practice is keeping factual news and comments separate / distinguishable. Obviously comments are subjective by nature.
- amyjess 11y agoSpeaking of clickbait titles, I'm reminded of Betteridge's law of headlines [0]: "Any headline that ends in a question mark can be answered by the word no." [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge%27s_law_of_headlines https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge%27s_law_of_headline...
- acheron 11y agoYou are at least the third person in ~30 comments to bring this up, and everyone keeps linking to the Wikipedia article as if we haven't all heard of it a thousand times before. It's a generic dismissal that adds nothing to the conversation. Either engage with the article and say why it's stupid, or just don't post at all and move on.
- yanowitz 11y agoThe arguments the author makes around technological constraints precluding language development seem wrong in a few ways, but I'm not that familiar with the field, so the column may be short handing more sophisticated analysis. Specifically: 1. Most (all?) written languages are linear -- they are processed sequentially by the brain and then deeper meanings are extracted (particularly wrt metaphors and allegory, but also viz. complex sentence structure). Emoji are not unique on this count. 2. Paper and pen (the surfer example) also have technological constraints. It's a "2D" surface, width of line, etc. 3. The input difficulties of emoji today seems temporary. For example, a gesture interface to get you to the correct emoji. 4. What about non-alphabetic written languages? These seem like obvious first-order responses to the article, so I suspect I'm missing something (besides my first cup of coffee).
- x3al 11y ago>What about non-alphabetic written languages? Some English words can already be writen without using the alphabet. For example, '2015'. I believe numerals in English are used exactly as emoji (or Chinese characters) in Japanese now: embedded inside the sentences, which are composed according to the grammar of language. >The input difficulties of emoji today seems temporary. It depends on language, in Japanese input methods a lot of emoji can be written exactly the same way you write rest words.
- aninhumer 11y agoAs an example of the latter, the default first suggestion in my Japanese IME for "ha-to" is "" rather than "ハート". EDIT: The symbol appears to have been stripped, but it was the unicode heart.
- bdchauvette 11y ago> It depends on language, in Japanese input methods a lot of emoji can be written exactly the same way you write rest words. The SwiftKey keyboard on Android offers this feature. If you turn it on and type 'angry', for example, it offers both the word and the emoji as predictions. It works pretty well for English, but I'm not sure how well it works for other languages SwiftKey supports.
- gopowerranger 11y agoWhy is this even a question asked? It's child-like gibberish!
- octo_t 11y agoI'm sure there are other forms of communication which seem child-like (and all foreign languages sound like gibberish to begin with)
- dexterdog 11y agoEspecially the forms of abbreviated communication that emoji tend to replace.
- VLM 11y agoWill you please stop making fun of Visual Basic? Thank You. Oh wait we were talking about emojis.
- SmellyGeekBoy 11y agoI thought I was still in the thread about UML ;)
- geographomics 11y agoWhy do you believe this to be true? Emojis convey meaning, often more concisely than other written language.
- silon7 11y agoLooks like squares to me.
- to3m 11y agoThough emoji is a young language, it already has great literature: http://www.emojidick.com/ http://www.emojidick.com/ EDIT: I tried to add something appropriate in emoji, but HN stripped most of it out.
- nakedrobot2 11y agoPredicted in the Diamond Age, it was called "mediaglyphs" I believe. (Or was that in Anathem?)
- to3m 11y agoAlso in Greg Bear's Eon series, where as I recall they were referred to as picts.
- schoen 11y agoIt's Diamond Age, and they were "mediaglyphics". https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/290233-what-are-letters-kinda-like-mediaglyphics-except-they-re-all-black https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/290233-what-are-letters-kin...
- robto 11y agoIn Anathem they are called "kinagrams".
- truebosko 11y agoHaven't emoji been huge in Japan and neighbouring countries for a long time now? They already are a language, but now it's spreading to western culture.
- guard-of-terra 11y agoIf they will, it will be not much easier to master than Chinese.
- anotherLevel 11y agoBetteridge's Law.
- bru_ 11y agoLol, thank you for reminding us of this golden nugget!
- imgabe 11y agoI thought the same thing about rage-faces, which morphed into a kind of hieroglyphics before they went out of fashion.
- weatherlight 11y agoIsn't that APL?
- dccoolgai 11y agoDarmok and Jalad at Tanagra.
- mizchief2 11y agonewspeak?
- pc2g4d 11y agoEmoji could be seen as introducing a common set of ideographs into the world's writing systems. They supplement existing languages, but seem unlikely to develop into their own language due to the conflicts in word order (SVO etc.) in the native languages of those using the emoji. Nicaraguan sign language arose essentially in the absence of another language, i.e. deaf people couldn't speak Spanish. But the vast majority of emoji users already have a language and so there seems little impetus for them to develop a new one.