Comment by WorldMaker | Hacker News Reader

Comment by WorldMaker | Hacker News Reader

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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.

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