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The language component hasn’t occurred to me, but suddenly makes sense. I once supported a customer for whom Google Translate wasn’t helping much, so we resorte

The language component hasn’t occurred to me, but suddenly makes sense. I once supported a customer for whom Google Translate wasn’t helping much, so we resorted to a combination of screenshots, boxes, arrows, and emojis and it ended well :)

setr 7y ago
However in most usages, there is no actual language benefit -- I doubt the animal emojis will actually help understanding of this article for any non-english speaker. In fact, I doubt you could really express anything beyond the simplest concepts with emojis in a language-agnostic fashion. Actually I'll go a step further: the idea of emoji as a language agnostic writing system is dumb. It's equivalent to pictograms, and like Chinese, will only become useful when you have a massive set of them, and you assign multiple layers of meaning for particular combinations that eventually take you down the path of culture-specific language anyways.
- Piskvorrr 7y ago
  Tbh, the animal concepts here might work - not universally, but for people familiar with Aesop's fables (Turtle and Hare?), as the animals seem to carry the usual Western traits.
- myself248 7y ago
  And the more specific those meanings get, the more divorced they become from the way a new observer interprets the plain symbol. Picard and Dathon, at El-Adrel.
  - codezero 7y ago
    Wow, thanks for that trip down memory lane! For anyone else who needs a reminder, have a read: https://www.startrek.com/article/picard-and-dathon-at-el-adrel-forever https://www.startrek.com/article/picard-and-dathon-at-el-adr...
- codezero 7y ago
  Bummer you're being downvoted, though I don't totally agree with what you said - I think it makes sense. I think the emojis in theory could aid in machine translation - that is - if the machine translation has some ambiguity, maybe the emoji could help, then again, I bet animal names and the concepts that an emoji can convey are the easy part of translation, so I guess I've convinced myself you probably are right. With that said, I do think that they could still act as visual aids and assist memory/retention, at least for some folks, though I'll admit at this point I'm trying to create a justification for the sake of doing it.
  - setr 7y ago
    Really there's only one real usecase for emojis.. to add flair. ʕノ•ᴥ•ʔノ︵ ┻━┻ They're not a tool. They're for fun. It's their original purpose, and it's what they do best, and it's not at all clear to me that we need to pretend they can do anything more -- fun is sufficient justification for their existence. The only real problem is that most emoji character sets don't properly optimize for that. They pretend they're far too important to simply be fun, and they instead become fairly ugly "realistic" depictions of whatever they're representing. ASCII art is somehow still dramatically more appealing, despite (or perhaps because of) emojis having much more freedom. Or actually more likely, it's because the only people who get to draw this stuff are the BigCo's, and they are not.. fun. I mean hell, the most basic ASCII emoji (smiley :) is still better than Apple's emoji
    - codezero 7y ago
      I don't think of things as so fixed. I think anything that is "for X" can become "for Y" if it's used creatively enough, so we'll see :)
      - setr 7y ago
        I'm not thinking of it as "fixed" so much as written languages do most other potential jobs better/clearer/faster than emojis. It's not sufficiently complex/composable enough to pose as a real challenger for expression. Any useful utility for emoji will be at best in addition to written language, not in replacement of it. And the major blocker is definitely the lack of composability; you have a very strict and very limited set of options to work with (and without composition, the rule "limitation breeds creativity" doesn't apply), so I have little hope for significant creativity to appear

setr 7y ago

However in most usages, there is no actual language benefit -- I doubt the animal emojis will actually help understanding of this article for any non-english speaker. In fact, I doubt you could really express anything beyond the simplest concepts with emojis in a language-agnostic fashion. Actually I'll go a step further: the idea of emoji as a language agnostic writing system is dumb. It's equivalent to pictograms, and like Chinese, will only become useful when you have a massive set of them, and you assign multiple layers of meaning for particular combinations that eventually take you down the path of culture-specific language anyways.

Piskvorrr 7y ago
Tbh, the animal concepts here might work - not universally, but for people familiar with Aesop's fables (Turtle and Hare?), as the animals seem to carry the usual Western traits.
myself248 7y ago
And the more specific those meanings get, the more divorced they become from the way a new observer interprets the plain symbol. Picard and Dathon, at El-Adrel.
- codezero 7y ago
  Wow, thanks for that trip down memory lane! For anyone else who needs a reminder, have a read: https://www.startrek.com/article/picard-and-dathon-at-el-adrel-forever https://www.startrek.com/article/picard-and-dathon-at-el-adr...
codezero 7y ago
Bummer you're being downvoted, though I don't totally agree with what you said - I think it makes sense. I think the emojis in theory could aid in machine translation - that is - if the machine translation has some ambiguity, maybe the emoji could help, then again, I bet animal names and the concepts that an emoji can convey are the easy part of translation, so I guess I've convinced myself you probably are right. With that said, I do think that they could still act as visual aids and assist memory/retention, at least for some folks, though I'll admit at this point I'm trying to create a justification for the sake of doing it.
- setr 7y ago
  Really there's only one real usecase for emojis.. to add flair. ʕノ•ᴥ•ʔノ︵ ┻━┻ They're not a tool. They're for fun. It's their original purpose, and it's what they do best, and it's not at all clear to me that we need to pretend they can do anything more -- fun is sufficient justification for their existence. The only real problem is that most emoji character sets don't properly optimize for that. They pretend they're far too important to simply be fun, and they instead become fairly ugly "realistic" depictions of whatever they're representing. ASCII art is somehow still dramatically more appealing, despite (or perhaps because of) emojis having much more freedom. Or actually more likely, it's because the only people who get to draw this stuff are the BigCo's, and they are not.. fun. I mean hell, the most basic ASCII emoji (smiley :) is still better than Apple's emoji
  - codezero 7y ago
    I don't think of things as so fixed. I think anything that is "for X" can become "for Y" if it's used creatively enough, so we'll see :)
    - setr 7y ago
      I'm not thinking of it as "fixed" so much as written languages do most other potential jobs better/clearer/faster than emojis. It's not sufficiently complex/composable enough to pose as a real challenger for expression. Any useful utility for emoji will be at best in addition to written language, not in replacement of it. And the major blocker is definitely the lack of composability; you have a very strict and very limited set of options to work with (and without composition, the rule "limitation breeds creativity" doesn't apply), so I have little hope for significant creativity to appear