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One of the things that has fascinated me about emoji is that they are a type of character that had been largely unfamiliar to most of the world: ideograms. Whil

One of the things that has fascinated me about emoji is that they are a type of character that had been largely unfamiliar to most of the world: ideograms. While their emergence in a country with a well-established ideographic writing system—Japan, kanji—may not be surprising, their widespread adoption in places that had basically used only alphabets is, at least to me. I wonder to what extent emoji use might evolve so that people without a common spoken language can use them to communicate with each other, the way classical Chinese has historically been used in East Asia. Judging from some emoji-filled comment sections I’ve seen on streaming platforms, it seems that that evolution may have already begun.

legostormtroopr 2y ago
I would be worried about such an environment where emojis were a serious communication mechanism. Both from a risk of misinterpretation and the fact that language could be changed by font designers. At present date there is no way to say "gun" in emoji, and even worse so the phrase "Bob brought a to work" would mean two different things at different time points - in 2013 Bob brought a gun to work, and in 2023 Bob brought a water gun to work. Drastically different meanings, that are changed not because the author changed the text - but font designers changed how "U+1F52B" is rendered. https://www.reddit.com/r/coolguides/comments/k1xxio/evolution_of_the_gun_emoji/ https://www.reddit.com/r/coolguides/comments/k1xxio/evolutio... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pistol_emoji https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pistol_emoji
Affric 2y ago
It’s an interesting thought. China, at least in the late 20th C, offered many western travellers a glimpse into this idea whereby a local would realise they don’t speak their language and then attempt to make the characters to the westerner. With that said, alphabetic writing is an indirection whereby the writing stands for sounds which stand for the objects. Logographic writing can copy grammars but the symbols can be read as the objects themselves. I think it’s a simpler form of communication in some ways and if you were ever going to invent new characters when your language is “complete” you would probably do it in this manner.
pflenker 2y ago
Interesting! So far I have seen the opposite - that different sub groups speaking the same language assign different meanings to different emojis, leading to misunderstandings when communicating cross-group. For example, the ubiquitous laugh-to-tears emoji means genuine amusement for some, sarcastic, sometimes even malicious laughter for others.
- deruta 2y ago
  Isn't it?! There's plenty of talking about how "we're regressing to hieroglyphs", but that doesn't capture the nuance in usage of emojis in different languages. Your example expands well to old-school emoticons. Where I live, an "xD" serves as a laugh and is used in rather general way. Meanwhile in the Anglosphere it's stereotypically associated with specific demographics
  - Dibby053 2y ago
    What demographics?
    - lolinder 2y ago
      As an American who uses it (well, a variant, XD) and knows where I adopted it, I'll hazard a guess: millennial men who were extremely online in the late 2000s and early 2010s, during the Golden Age of phpBB and before the rise of the smartphone and modern social media.
      - msephton 2y ago
        FWIW phpBB was released in year 2000, just to place that on the timeline.
thih9 2y ago
> I wonder to what extent emoji use might evolve so that people without a common spoken language can use them to communicate with each other I’m guessing the availability and quality of automatic translators is the limiter in this kind of emoji evolution. Most of the popular social media platforms already allow their users to translate content (posts, comments, subtitles in video, etc) into their language.
- msephton 2y ago
  Why translate text to and from languages when we can get across concepts using only emoji? Of course not for everything but for a lot of stuff. Definitely room for both to co-exist.
wddkcs 2y ago
Emojis capture emotional context. Definitions would track with groups of similar temperament.
- kubanczyk 2y ago
  My daughter sending me a car emoji has nothing to do with emotional context.
  - wddkcs 2y ago
    Your ignorance of the content doesn't rule out it's existence
hypercube33 2y ago
I mean the Internet adopted ASCII emoji like smilies and what not pretty early on from what I know. Also capslock for yelling is pretty widely known but I don't think there is any way other than chat or word of mouth people pick up on a lot of these.
- GolDDranks 2y ago
  ASCII smilies are not emojis though, they are repurposing other chracters for building emoticons as ASCII art. Emojis (絵/e = picture, 文字/moji = character) refer to characters that represent a picture of something as a single character.
  - lolinder 2y ago
    This is something of a distinction without a difference when we're talking about Western use of ideographic writing in general. Ideographs that are put together from existing symbols are still ideographs if the final shape represents an idea that it also physically resembles. Emoticons were widely used in exactly the same place where we find emoji today, and were conceptually perceived as atomic units, not as colon + parenthesis or whatever. What makes an emoji different than an emoticon is mostly that some official body gave official recognition to the emoji's existence by adopting it in Unicode and didn't do so for the emoticon.
    - numpad0 2y ago
      I think GP is kind of also correct, since emojis were more of first person expressions[1] while emoticons and kaomoji[2] tended to be second person. 1: :seedling:, :eyes:, :bow:, :ok_woman:, ... 2: 顔文字, "face-moji", e.g. `(๑•̀ㅂ•́)و`
      - lolinder 2y ago
        I'm not sure that I agree. Maybe the kaomoji were used for second/third person (I haven't used them much), but :) :( :D and friends aren't any less first person expressions than most emoji are.
euroderf 2y ago
Ideograms are "too far gone" to be recognisable to Western readers now - too evolved away from their roots, when different writing instruments were used. So FWIW I would expect that your hypothetical future emoji conlang will not resemble them. Maybe it will look like an AI has redesigned airport symbology ?
- joveian 2y ago
  At which point it would just be NIH to not just use Chinese. As I understand it, the Americas had vastly more linguistic diversity prior to European contact than the rest of the world combined. I don't know about further south but in at least much of North America sign language was used as a common language. I'd guess if you want to create what could be a universal language you would want to try to align written, spoken, tactile, and signed forms as much as possible, which would suggest directly aligning the signed and written forms as much as possible since both are (at least mostly) visual. And if possible keep the tactile version as close as possible as well. The spoken aspect seems like the hardest and maybe better to not bother with that at all. Also, IMO emojis are too small. I've been wanting a 4x size for emoji (double width and height). With more compact writing systems you can make everything bigger.
  - euroderf 2y ago
    > The spoken aspect seems like the hardest and maybe better to not bother with that at all. You'd probably find that this is precisely where linguistic evolution is fastest (kids, teens, etc.) and it would quickly get out of step with other modes.
    - joveian 2y ago
      Good point, for best long term large distance mutual understanding it is probably best to avoid anyone using it too much and particularly kids.
      - joveian 2y ago
        I remembered after a bit that some people teach their infants a simplified sign language to introduce them to language faster, so to the extent that spoken language evolves faster I'm guessing it is just because it is most widely used.
anal_reactor 2y ago
>While their emergence in a country with a well-established ideographic writing system—Japan, kanji—may not be surprising, their widespread adoption in places that had basically used only alphabets is, at least to me. I think that western world held a very arrogant view that alphabets are somehow inherently better than ideograms. Even when we started using letters to create simple drawings that would be put inside text, most people still completely denied the possibly of using ideograms. "It's just a small fad on this small little thing called 'computer', nobody actually does this". When you stop thinking this way then it becomes obvious that, if the Japanese decided to keep ideograms, even though they already have not one but two ways of writing phonetically, then there must be some advantage of using ideograms, they don't keep kanji around just for shits and giggles. >I wonder to what extent emoji use might evolve so that people without a common spoken language can use them to communicate with each other I can't see this happening. The way we construct sentences makes us think of letters first, and then tune the meaning using emojis. In order for such communication to occur, we'd need to invert this process: communicate with emojis first, and then use letters on top of that. Our language is simply not compatible with that way of thinking. It's easier for everyone to just learn English.

legostormtroopr 2y ago

I would be worried about such an environment where emojis were a serious communication mechanism. Both from a risk of misinterpretation and the fact that language could be changed by font designers. At present date there is no way to say "gun" in emoji, and even worse so the phrase "Bob brought a to work" would mean two different things at different time points - in 2013 Bob brought a gun to work, and in 2023 Bob brought a water gun to work. Drastically different meanings, that are changed not because the author changed the text - but font designers changed how "U+1F52B" is rendered. https://www.reddit.com/r/coolguides/comments/k1xxio/evolution_of_the_gun_emoji/ https://www.reddit.com/r/coolguides/comments/k1xxio/evolutio... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pistol_emoji https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pistol_emoji

Affric 2y ago

It’s an interesting thought. China, at least in the late 20th C, offered many western travellers a glimpse into this idea whereby a local would realise they don’t speak their language and then attempt to make the characters to the westerner. With that said, alphabetic writing is an indirection whereby the writing stands for sounds which stand for the objects. Logographic writing can copy grammars but the symbols can be read as the objects themselves. I think it’s a simpler form of communication in some ways and if you were ever going to invent new characters when your language is “complete” you would probably do it in this manner.

pflenker 2y ago

Interesting! So far I have seen the opposite - that different sub groups speaking the same language assign different meanings to different emojis, leading to misunderstandings when communicating cross-group. For example, the ubiquitous laugh-to-tears emoji means genuine amusement for some, sarcastic, sometimes even malicious laughter for others.

deruta 2y ago
Isn't it?! There's plenty of talking about how "we're regressing to hieroglyphs", but that doesn't capture the nuance in usage of emojis in different languages. Your example expands well to old-school emoticons. Where I live, an "xD" serves as a laugh and is used in rather general way. Meanwhile in the Anglosphere it's stereotypically associated with specific demographics
- Dibby053 2y ago
  What demographics?
  - lolinder 2y ago
    As an American who uses it (well, a variant, XD) and knows where I adopted it, I'll hazard a guess: millennial men who were extremely online in the late 2000s and early 2010s, during the Golden Age of phpBB and before the rise of the smartphone and modern social media.
    - msephton 2y ago
      FWIW phpBB was released in year 2000, just to place that on the timeline.

thih9 2y ago

> I wonder to what extent emoji use might evolve so that people without a common spoken language can use them to communicate with each other I’m guessing the availability and quality of automatic translators is the limiter in this kind of emoji evolution. Most of the popular social media platforms already allow their users to translate content (posts, comments, subtitles in video, etc) into their language.

msephton 2y ago
Why translate text to and from languages when we can get across concepts using only emoji? Of course not for everything but for a lot of stuff. Definitely room for both to co-exist.

wddkcs 2y ago

Emojis capture emotional context. Definitions would track with groups of similar temperament.

kubanczyk 2y ago
My daughter sending me a car emoji has nothing to do with emotional context.
- wddkcs 2y ago
  Your ignorance of the content doesn't rule out it's existence

hypercube33 2y ago

I mean the Internet adopted ASCII emoji like smilies and what not pretty early on from what I know. Also capslock for yelling is pretty widely known but I don't think there is any way other than chat or word of mouth people pick up on a lot of these.

GolDDranks 2y ago
ASCII smilies are not emojis though, they are repurposing other chracters for building emoticons as ASCII art. Emojis (絵/e = picture, 文字/moji = character) refer to characters that represent a picture of something as a single character.
- lolinder 2y ago
  This is something of a distinction without a difference when we're talking about Western use of ideographic writing in general. Ideographs that are put together from existing symbols are still ideographs if the final shape represents an idea that it also physically resembles. Emoticons were widely used in exactly the same place where we find emoji today, and were conceptually perceived as atomic units, not as colon + parenthesis or whatever. What makes an emoji different than an emoticon is mostly that some official body gave official recognition to the emoji's existence by adopting it in Unicode and didn't do so for the emoticon.
  - numpad0 2y ago
    I think GP is kind of also correct, since emojis were more of first person expressions[1] while emoticons and kaomoji[2] tended to be second person. 1: :seedling:, :eyes:, :bow:, :ok_woman:, ... 2: 顔文字, "face-moji", e.g. `(๑•̀ㅂ•́)و`
    - lolinder 2y ago
      I'm not sure that I agree. Maybe the kaomoji were used for second/third person (I haven't used them much), but :) :( :D and friends aren't any less first person expressions than most emoji are.

euroderf 2y ago

Ideograms are "too far gone" to be recognisable to Western readers now - too evolved away from their roots, when different writing instruments were used. So FWIW I would expect that your hypothetical future emoji conlang will not resemble them. Maybe it will look like an AI has redesigned airport symbology ?

joveian 2y ago
At which point it would just be NIH to not just use Chinese. As I understand it, the Americas had vastly more linguistic diversity prior to European contact than the rest of the world combined. I don't know about further south but in at least much of North America sign language was used as a common language. I'd guess if you want to create what could be a universal language you would want to try to align written, spoken, tactile, and signed forms as much as possible, which would suggest directly aligning the signed and written forms as much as possible since both are (at least mostly) visual. And if possible keep the tactile version as close as possible as well. The spoken aspect seems like the hardest and maybe better to not bother with that at all. Also, IMO emojis are too small. I've been wanting a 4x size for emoji (double width and height). With more compact writing systems you can make everything bigger.
- euroderf 2y ago
  > The spoken aspect seems like the hardest and maybe better to not bother with that at all. You'd probably find that this is precisely where linguistic evolution is fastest (kids, teens, etc.) and it would quickly get out of step with other modes.
  - joveian 2y ago
    Good point, for best long term large distance mutual understanding it is probably best to avoid anyone using it too much and particularly kids.
    - joveian 2y ago
      I remembered after a bit that some people teach their infants a simplified sign language to introduce them to language faster, so to the extent that spoken language evolves faster I'm guessing it is just because it is most widely used.

anal_reactor 2y ago

>While their emergence in a country with a well-established ideographic writing system—Japan, kanji—may not be surprising, their widespread adoption in places that had basically used only alphabets is, at least to me. I think that western world held a very arrogant view that alphabets are somehow inherently better than ideograms. Even when we started using letters to create simple drawings that would be put inside text, most people still completely denied the possibly of using ideograms. "It's just a small fad on this small little thing called 'computer', nobody actually does this". When you stop thinking this way then it becomes obvious that, if the Japanese decided to keep ideograms, even though they already have not one but two ways of writing phonetically, then there must be some advantage of using ideograms, they don't keep kanji around just for shits and giggles. >I wonder to what extent emoji use might evolve so that people without a common spoken language can use them to communicate with each other I can't see this happening. The way we construct sentences makes us think of letters first, and then tune the meaning using emojis. In order for such communication to occur, we'd need to invert this process: communicate with emojis first, and then use letters on top of that. Our language is simply not compatible with that way of thinking. It's easier for everyone to just learn English.