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Comment by cooper12 | Hacker News Reader

It might seem like a new fad to you, but emoji were long in use in Japan and lacking standardization across major carriers. Not sure how I feel about the consortium being the sole arbitrator of the expansion/globalization of the symbols though. I'm not sure I'm exactly getting what you mean by creativity, but it has been shown before in the decision to do Han unification [0] back when there was less space. Modern Unicode has plenty of room though, and there are quite a few dead languages in the standard.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Han_unification

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People seem to be ignoring that in the absence of standards, the same thing would happen but potentially vary wildly from one platform to the next.

This is western bias. They're simply not aware that what you're describing has been happening with East Asian telecom companies for the last 10-15 years.

Yeah, Wikipedia says it goes back to 1999.

It's certainly a hit in the West, though. Every social media outlet I see is flooded with various emoji. Clearly people are using them, and Unicode has plenty of space, so why not standardize? If anything, it will slow down the proliferation of emoji.

It's a new sort of language! It's really fascinating from a linguistic standpoint. And yes, I think that the more standardized it becomes the more creative people will get with it since it wont split into too many different dialects (Android, iOS, Softbank, or etc.)

Dead languages are real languages though. Emoji is stuff we're just making up as we go along.

We could just create a WingDings-esque font for containing all of this stuff. It would be better to incorporate multi-font support into more devices rather than incorporate informal symbols into Unicode.

I am aware of the massive number of symbols represented in Unicode, but it seems that the vast majority of them are related to existing languages, or other symbols that are used in government. Not 400 different smileys of every race, and cats...

Edit: By creativity, I mean that Unicode is about expressing language and officially-recognized symbols. Incorporating art into it is contrary to the purpose of Unicode.

Real languages are just stuff people make up as they go along, too. Having emoji in Unicode rather than in a font which maps arbitrary code points to arbitrary symbols means there is a defined standard so different fonts can be created independently representing the same ideas with different renderings.

If you don't think that emoji is an expressive language then you may have missed a few years of internet history. ;)

Some of the dead languages in Unicode arguably were never "real" languages and history disputes if they were actual written forms for a language or merely local doodles. Their relevance to Unicode is apparently there is so much academic work still trying to sort out said history that papers are written all the time with those dead symbols. (For all we know, some of them may even be ancient emoji. :P )

The difference between "formal" and "informal" is a fuzzy zone. It's almost like we're making up all of language as we go along. Unicode seems like a fine place to standardize our growing need for emoji. Also, for what it is worth, all of WingDings is also in Unicode and has been since early on.

My only criticism with emoji in Unicode is that I do think it means that Unicode should reconsider its stance on previously closed proposals for constructed languages like Klingon and Tengwar and maybe dedicate a section somewhere outside of the basic multilingual plane (BMP) for them.

> If you don't think that emoji is an expressive language then you may have missed a few years of internet history. ;)

If you think emoji is an expressive language, then I'd like you to make an argument toward that point in emoji.

I'm not the gp, but I think I can explain. Emoji isn't your prototypical "what you learn in school" language, but there is a huge amount of language that you don't learn in school. Emoji is kind of like non-verbal communication, which is language. Also some emoji is certainly more language-y than others. Here's why:

1. Emoji only typically exists in the written form, but that isn't really a strike against it: paragraphs, capital letters, and (to some extent) word-breaks only exist in the written form too.

2. They have a conceptual existence, and communicative force, that is separate from any particular representation. You can't copy-write the smiley grapheme. You could copy-write a particular smiley image (or "graph"), much like you could copy-write a glyph, but that's it.

Emoji isn't used to express complex arguments. It is most often used to express emotions in text. Because people are hardwired to recognize emotions in other people's faces an emjoi activates different parts of the brain than text expressing the same feeling. This can make a conversion using text more like a conversation face to face which is important for lots of casual conversion that now happens via the internet.

Finally emoji is important for many young children in Japan and China, (I'm not an expert on this). The issue is learning all the characters needed to express yourself is pretty hard and takes years longer than learning the latin alphabet. Further learning how to input characters on a computer takes even longer. However kids still want to communicate with each other and as a result use a lot of emoji to speed up the process for them. For them emjoi is how they want to express themselves.

I made an argument toward that point in the post itself that you may have gotten the expressions from it without even realizing it. You even quoted part of it. To be fair, I did it a bit old school which might have made the argument blend in further to the background and also because HN strips the applicable Unicode.

Yes you do have a point about how the older languages were already established while emoji is just currently growing at a whim. The utility of the newer characters can certainly be argued, but reading the link certain selection factors must be met, so at least its not a free-for-all. As for your explanation of creativity thats certainly a longer discussion that deserves to be had.

The problems with a specific font for extra characters are: who would standardize it? And (assuming Unicode) how would they be represented in code points? You could use Unicode's Private Use Areas,[0] but from my understanding that might result in different characters viewed for the recipient if their implementation overlaps yours.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Private_Use_Areas

The unicode standard doesn't include the artwork, only a description of how the symbol should be represented. It's up to individual platforms to provide the art.

All the emoji part of the Unicode standard is, when you think about it, is a way to provide all the different "WingDings-esque fonts" a common set of names/identifiers for their little pictures†, so that something that looks like a smiley face in Android WingDings will still be something that looks like a smiley face in iOS WingDings.

(Well, that, and asserting a minimum shared base of symbols that each WingDings font is expected to have depictions for. I think that's a less important role, though; they could just as easily get away with shipping a "Unicode-official fallback emoji font" instead, that would backfill for any codepoints a particular OS's emoji font doesn't have.)

---

† Identifiers for the pictures themselves, not the concepts they represent. That's an important distinction, I think: there really isn't a difference in concept between U+1F601 'GRINNING FACE WITH SMILING EYES' and U+1F638 'GRINNING CAT FACE WITH SMILING EYES'—but they're different little pictures. Effectively, they're like an icon/logotype/mark, with each font giving you a different artist's treatment on that mark.)

> It might seem like a new fad to you, but emoji were long in use in Japan

And what are dingbat typefaces if not emoji under an other name? Nobody cared when unicode added U+2701 UPPER BLADE SCISSORS and U+273B TEARDROP SPOKED ASTERISK.

A dingbat typeface can't be easily used within regular text of another typeface, which is by and large how emoji are used.

The debate isn't about how to standardize the display of symbols on platforms, but how to allow the incorporation those symbols into everyday text.

> A dingbat typeface can't be easily used within regular text of another typeface, which is by and large how emoji are used.

Are you confused? U+2701 UPPER BLADE SCISSORS is a Unicode codepoint, it can most definitely be used "within regular text of another typeface".

Yes, I misunderstood. I thought you were suggesting a font that replaced existing character codepoints with symbols, along the lines of wingdings.

Ah, no I was pointing out that the "argle bargle emoji are an insult to unicode" crowd were nowhere to be seen between the addition of dingbats symbols, geometric shapes or box drawing symbols circa 1991 and the integration of emoji in 2010, since which they have become strangely vocal.

I agree, however given the limited scope of dingbats symbols and the (at the time) unlikeliness that it would grow significantly, I can understand the different reactions. Not to mention there weren't many forums for the general populace to disagree back in 1991.

Bah, bullshit I say, the argle bargle crowd didn't make a noise when Unicode 4 added support for the fucking shavian alphabet either, which lest you be confused is not an ancient language but a synthetic phonetic alternative english alphabet invented in the 60s.

> given the limited scope of dingbats symbols

There is no limited scope, dingbats is just stuff that's neither numbers nor "letters".

> And what are dingbat typefaces if not emoji under an other name? Nobody cared when unicode added U+2701 UPPER BLADE SCISSORS and U+273B TEARDROP SPOKED ASTERISK.

Just because nobody complained doesn't mean that it wasn't a problem.

I didn't think there was any problem. Little did I realize my OS was running with U+2701 UPPER BLADE SCISSORS.

I'm going to venture a guess that you don't write much rendering code or fonts.

A polluted standard makes it more difficult to implement the standard. In practice this is passed on to the user in performance and monetary cost, not in something more visible. The fact that you don't understand the problem is due to you not working with Unicode at a low level.

It was a joke.

The amount of mind reading you believed you managed to accomplish from a setup and a punch line is pretty astounding. Maybe leave that to the magicians?

I'm sorry for mistaking your statement as an attempt to contribute to the conversation. It might have been clearer that it was a joke if it were funny.

No worries. Given the absurdity of the conversation there wasn't really anything appropriate to add but joking around, but the joke was meant for people who aren't humorless, so I understand why you'd be confused.

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