Will emoji become a new language? | Hacker News Reader

Will emoji become a new language?

bbc.com

37 pointsd_a_robson33 comments

A 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).

> eg. in newspapers

http://www.theguardian.com/media/2015/oct/12/us-todays-faceb...

I 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.

> Emotions should be kept far away from news, (..)

Yes.

> (continued) anything subjective should be.

No.

Subjective is fine, but good practice is keeping factual news and comments separate / distinguishable. Obviously comments are subjective by nature.

Speaking 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_headline...

You 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.

The 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).

>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.

As 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.

> 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.

> 2. Paper and pen (the surfer example) also have technological constraints. It's a "2D" surface, width of line, etc.

This is true, but it's kind of true in the same way that walking and flying both have movement constraints. Flying certainly has limitations, but just like pen & paper give you more flexibility in composition than entering a string of characters, flying offers much more freedom of movement than walking.

> 4. What about non-alphabetic written languages?

Most (all?) current non-alphabetic orthographies are non-pictographic. While many characters for common words may have started that way, the majority of characters in these systems are nowadays not obvious pictorial representations of their meaning.

It's possible that this will eventually be the case with emoji, too, but currently it's not.

A classic example of Betteridge's Law of Headlines.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge%27s_law_of_headline...

Though emoji is a young language, it already has great literature: http://www.emojidick.com/

EDIT: I tried to add something appropriate in emoji, but HN stripped most of it out.

Predicted in the Diamond Age, it was called "mediaglyphs" I believe. (Or was that in Anathem?)

Also in Greg Bear's Eon series, where as I recall they were referred to as picts.

It's Diamond Age, and they were "mediaglyphics".

https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/290233-what-are-letters-kin...

In Anathem they are called "kinagrams".

Emoji 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.

If they will, it will be not much easier to master than Chinese.

Haven'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.

I thought the same thing about rage-faces, which morphed into a kind of hieroglyphics before they went out of fashion.

Isn't that APL?

Betteridge's Law.

Lol, thank you for reminding us of this golden nugget!

Darmok and Jalad at Tanagra.

Why is this even a question asked? It's child-like gibberish!

I'm sure there are other forms of communication which seem child-like (and all foreign languages sound like gibberish to begin with)

Especially the forms of abbreviated communication that emoji tend to replace.

Will you please stop making fun of Visual Basic? Thank You.

Oh wait we were talking about emojis.

I thought I was still in the thread about UML ;)

Why do you believe this to be true? Emojis convey meaning, often more concisely than other written language.

Looks like squares to me.

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