> could you give an example please? Here are three two-character combinations in Japanese in which the first kanji 有 functions as a verb and the second kanji a

> could you give an example please? Here are three two-character combinations in Japanese in which the first kanji 有 functions as a verb and the second kanji as a noun: 有人 <to possess> + <person> “manned” (as in “a manned spacecraft”) 有力 <to possess> + <strength> “powerful; influential” 有線 <to possess> + <line; wire> “wired” (as in “wired Internet connection”) Here are a couple of examples where the verb-like character 有 is preceded by an adverb-like character: 共有 <together> + <to possess> “joint ownership” 現有 <presently> + <to possess> “existing; current” Many of these combinations, and the patterns by which they are formed, originated in Chinese, which is why many have a Verb + Object order. Chinese is a verb-medial, or SVO, language, while Japanese is SOV. The grammar that influences the formation of these combinations (called jukugo in Japanese) is productive, in the sense that new combinations can be formed and used based on the same rules, but it is not as productive as the grammar of sentence formation. Most of the jukugo that one encounters in writing and, especially, in speech are fixed vocabulary items and are treated as words, not as phrases or sentences. Their etymology, however, is usually clear in writing and aids in their understanding; that is one advantage of ideographs, and it also makes it easier to create neologisms when writing. In speech, because many characters are pronounced the same, it is more difficult to use novel combinations and still be understood. > If anything, I suspect emojis would most likely evolve into some kind of ideophone-like system. That certainly seems possible, too. I suspect, though, that if they evolve into anything, it will be many different linguistic systems, for many different online communities. > Japanese is quite unusual amongst logographic writing systems in having so many readings for each character. ... Thus, I doubt that any descendant of emojis would end up like this. Unless emoji acquire readings from a variety of languages, which seems possible, as they are already being used online in multilingual contexts. Let’s wait and see!