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Emojipedia.org
- sreenadh 9y agoAre all emojis just unicode?
- Freak_NL 9y agoDepends on what you mean by emoji, but all of the emoji you can use on smartphones and in social media tend to be part of the Unicode standard. They are like any other Unicode character; i.e., they have their own codepoint assigned, and can be represented in a valid Unicode encoding such as UTF-8. Some can be modified with modifying characters (skin colour is a modifiable attribute these days), but this too is not a new feature (e.g., combining diacritic characters do this too, although mostly you would just use the composed variants (like é) instead).
- kensai 9y agoI was exactly here yesterday after a discussion with a friend of mine about the meaning of "Face With Steam From Nose" [1]. I work in an academic institute with many nationalities and almost all people (of different cultural backgrounds) describe this emoticon as an emoticon showing anger and frustration. Yet the official description in Unicode 6.0 [2] is "face with look of triumph" . Was it simply bad design? [1] http://emojipedia.org/face-with-look-of-triumph/ http://emojipedia.org/face-with-look-of-triumph/ [2] http://unicode.org/charts/PDF/Unicode-6.0/U60-1F600.pdf http://unicode.org/charts/PDF/Unicode-6.0/U60-1F600.pdf I am curious, have you found other similar examples?
- Freak_NL 9y ago> Was it simply bad design? No, just a cultural difference. Most of the early emoji in Unicode were drawn from the existing set of emoji already in use in Japanese telecom. As such, these emoji have a strong Japanese cultural bias in their original meanings. One of the goals of Unicode is to be able to encode text from existing encodings. In (informal) Japanese communication these emoji were in use, so Unicode encoded them. Readers of Japanese comics are probably familiar with most of these facial expressions, including that triumphant look. The Samsung one on emojipedia is probably closest to that emoji's archetype.
- kensai 9y agoIndeed, the Samsung one was the only one I found "triumphant"! ;) But as I said, I asked around our Institute where we are from different nationalities and continents. No one said it was triumphant and actually they were quite surprised of its "official" description.
- 1_player 9y agoI don't have an answer, but emojis seem to have been inspired by the Japanese culture. Perhaps steam from the nose is a common Japanese representation of victory? I get that emojis were first invented for use on Japanese phones, but I don't understand why they kept them Japanese oriented when merged into Unicode? There's ideographs [1], acronyms that are relevant only to JP [2] and fish on a pole [3] Surely we could've made better use of the Unicode space to use a common set of symbol shared by all cultures. 1: http://emojipedia.org/squared-cjk-unified-ideograph-7981/ http://emojipedia.org/squared-cjk-unified-ideograph-7981/ 2: http://emojipedia.org/squared-ng/ http://emojipedia.org/squared-ng/ 3: http://emojipedia.org/carp-streamer/ http://emojipedia.org/carp-streamer/
- Freak_NL 9y ago> Surely we could've made better use of the Unicode space […] There is plenty of space. Keep in mind that one of the goals of Unicode is to be able to represent existing corpora of text by means of a global standard. Emoji were in widespread use in Japanese mobile phones long before smartphones existed; that alone legitimises their presence in the Unicode standard. Like a dictionary, the Unicode standard is in a large part descriptive rather than prescriptive. It catalogues what is in use, not what ought to be used. However, recent emoji contributions do seem to have been made in the spirit of filling lacunae in the set.
- franciscop 9y agoThat actually happens a lot with English but native English speakers (or those foreigners with similar langs/cultures) normally don't realize that it is happening. Defining world culture symbols would be pretty hard. If you count by number of people there'd be a lot more Asian cultural things than you would expect.
- accountyaccount 9y agoJapan has a lot of cultural differences in their iconography.
- cyxxon 9y agoI was surprised a lot when Apple changed the grinning face emoji in iOS 10 to a boring smile. For me and my friends the original version was a sort of mischivious smile, but definitely positive. Seems a ton of people had negative connotations with it, and it got voted out by majority opinion. The new one conveys a totally different meaning for me, and as such I have basically stopped using it. I tend to use "Face With Stuck-Out Tongue & Winking Eye" now instead... Also: browsing Emojipedia I just realised that the Smirking Face is supposed to be smirking... I always interpreted it as annoyed or bored... talk about ambiguity...
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- danso 9y agoI'm fascinated by people who think emoji could someday be a more universal way of communication given all of its inherent ambiguity. My off-the-top-of-my-head example was the prayer emoji, which has popularly been said to be a mistranslation of a purported "high five": http://www.deseretnews.com/article/865606309/This-emoji-may-not-be-what-you-think-it-is.html http://www.deseretnews.com/article/865606309/This-emoji-may-... But as Emojipedia points out, the Unicode definition is "person with folded hands". As a Westerner, I'm inclined to associate this with "prayer". But since we have the Japanese to largely thank for emoji in the first place, shouldn't this emoji be seen as "please" or "thank you"? http://emojipedia.org/person-with-folded-hands/ http://emojipedia.org/person-with-folded-hands/ And if you look at that Emojipedia entry, you start to appreciate the cluaterfuck of things lost in translation. Not only is the gesture of folded hands of varied meanings across cultures, but each software vendor adds their own interpretation. Compare Samsung's rendering: http://emojipedia-us.s3.amazonaws.com/cache/f7/f4/f7f45466d6cb6ccb8aa1c485bffd2ecc.png http://emojipedia-us.s3.amazonaws.com/cache/f7/f4/f7f45466d6... With HTCs: http://emojipedia-us.s3.amazonaws.com/cache/97/d6/97d6ea79e4b42ec8dcedf05b1f6a0431.png http://emojipedia-us.s3.amazonaws.com/cache/97/d6/97d6ea79e4... Admittedly, emojis are more immediately expressive than, say, learning a whole other written language. But the amount of ambiguity and confusion ultimately remains the same IMO
- janitor61 9y agoI think the book "Book from the Ground" by Xu Bing shows what can be done with an emoji-only format. I found the book on a whim at a used book store, and found it a fascinating "read". Excerpts: http://asiasociety.org/blog/asia/always-pioneer-artist-xu-bing-now-takes-novel-beyond-written-word http://asiasociety.org/blog/asia/always-pioneer-artist-xu-bi...
- dqv 9y agoIt can still be a universal language - it will just have different dialects.
- sreenadh 9y agoYes. Emojis are a pictorial representation. Even some scripts of early civilization used communicate via pictures. Plus emojis-like symbols are even used by autistic kids. There is an app in ipad with all pictures that they use to communicate what they want.
- eriknstr 9y agoEmojipedia is a great resource, I use it frequently to find emojis by name.
- theandrewbailey 9y agoIf you have a textbox on the internet, eventually some special snowflake will put emoji into it. And one day, you'll wake up to your backend systems on fire, because someone decided that their name was the smiling pile of poop emoji.[0] (Are your backend systems jealous that someone else is named that?) I've recently needed to make some fields emoji-proof. This seems like a great resource for testing. Thanks for sharing. [0] http://emojipedia.org/pile-of-poo/ http://emojipedia.org/pile-of-poo/
- afandian 9y agoHappened to me. It uncovered Java's handling of surrogate pairs. I fixed my code, because it was technically broken before. http://stackoverflow.com/questions/42457416/jq-cant-parse-an-unicode-emoji-character-is-it-valid-json http://stackoverflow.com/questions/42457416/jq-cant-parse-an...
- danso 9y agoReminds me of when I wrote an app to track and store tweets about a given hashtag. Worked fine in its first few months, then started throwing encoding errors right around the time Twitter enabled emoji support. I was using MySQL as a data store and was ignorant to the fact that UTF8 encoding in MySQL only uses 3 bytes. I was ignorant about encoding in general but thought that UTF8 always meant 4-bytes. Apparently so did many other MySQL users, and it was bad enough that MySQL questions on Stackoverflow are already filled with erroneous info about all kinds of encoding issues. The search for the fix -- which is that MySQL has a utf8mb4 encoding for 4-bytes -- was probably the most frustrating debugging exercise in my career. Even worse was the eventual revelation that the MySQL devs were technically right -- the UTF8 spec says nothing about requiring 4 bytes, and 3 bytes probably seemed sensible enough in terms of efficiency at the time of MySQL 4.
- rootlocus 9y agoFrom RFC-3629 [1] (the UTF8 spec), on page 4: In UTF-8, characters from the U+0000..U+10FFFF range (the UTF-16 accessible range) are encoded using sequences of 1 to 4 octets. It would be absurd for an encoding that's used by 88.9% of the web [2] to be implemented in a way that doesn't respect the standard. [1] https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc3629#page-5 https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc3629#page-5 [2] https://www.wikiwand.com/en/UTF-8 https://www.wikiwand.com/en/UTF-8
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- kingexe 9y agono twitch emojis? FailFish
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- miguelrochefort 9y agoWow. I never thought all those emojis were implemented on so many different platforms. Are there official specs? Who designed the original emojis everyone else copied?
- drake01 9y agocan't believe it made it to hn front page. HackerNews works in mysterious ways.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- rootlocus 9y agoI don't understand why emojis should be customizable with skin colors. And five of them nonetheless. If discriminating based on skin color is racist, why do we invent new ways to do it? I'd rather use a single color for everyone (don't care which) because I don't want to express "a black man smiling", I want to express "a man smiling".
- petepete 9y agoYeah this makes much more sense. Implementers can localise if they want but skin colour isn't that important. I should totally be able to long press on dog emoji for a breed selector though.
- timpark 9y ago> (don't care which) > I don't want to express "a black man smiling" Which is it?
- rootlocus 9y agoGreen would be fine.
- wingerlang 9y agoAre you deliberately avoiding the rest of what he wrote? The point is that he doesn't care to involve color at all, having only one color would remove the "it's color X smiling" choice.
- nicky0 9y agoJust use the default yellow colour then.
- 100k 9y agoThis ignores the context that emojis came from. All of the people depicted were light skinned. Emojis didn't start neutral and gain ethnic skin colors. They started light-skinned and gained a neutral color -- and the choice to select other skin colors.
- amelius 9y agoEmojimakers do not seem to understand that there is a difference between big smiles. For example, this [1] big smile represents a totally different emotion than [2]. Now look at the "grinning face" set of emoticons [3], which represents a total grab-bag of emotions. You really can't reliably use emoticons these days. [1] https://img.myloview.es/fotomurales/gran-sonrisa-con-dientes-400-6831667.jpg https://img.myloview.es/fotomurales/gran-sonrisa-con-dientes... [2] http://www.clipartkid.com/images/101/smiley-face-clip-art-emotions-clipart-panda-free-clipart-images-S5COzM-clipart.jpeg http://www.clipartkid.com/images/101/smiley-face-clip-art-em... [3] http://emojipedia.org/grinning-face/ http://emojipedia.org/grinning-face/
- retox 9y agoWaste of energy, time, resources. Disgrace. Frivolity. Shameful. A pustule, a wart, a bubo, a carbuncle. The people who produced this are oxygen thieves. The clean water and food that have sustained these people would be better spent harbouring anthrax spores.
- rhinoceraptor 9y agoI don't understand why whimsical unicode inspires such hate.
- ygaf 9y agoThe anthrax jibe made me laugh though.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- spthorn60 9y agoInteresting insight into the emoji approval process (podcast): https://food52.com/blog/19350-why-is-there-no-pie-emoji https://food52.com/blog/19350-why-is-there-no-pie-emoji Also: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11958682 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11958682