
The rise of emoji - ascertain
https://www.the-tls.co.uk/articles/public/hopeful-face-emoji/
======
AndyMcConachie
> In The Emoji Code, Vyvyan Evans takes aim at the Unicode Consortium,
> painting it as an institution in the mould of the Académie française,
> tyranically subjugating the linguistic will of the people by restricting
> their free use of cartoon icons, behind it all compelled by Silicon Valley
> corporate greed, since the members of its technical committee include such
> blue-chip tech companies as Apple, Google, Facebook and IBM.

This is bullshit. I just finished reading this book and Evans does nothing of
the sort.

Evans is a respected linguist who takes his training and applies it to emoji.
I also have some training in linguistics and the only thing that really
bothered me about the book is that it wasn't academic enough. I thought it was
a bit too pop-sci, but this just means it wasn't written with people like me
in mind. It was written for a more lay audience and that's OK. Evans does a
very good job of explaining complex subjects to people without any prior
exposure to academic linguistics. In general, The Emoji Code is a good book. I
just would have preferred something a bit deeper.

The real strength in Evans book for me was his discussion of Emoji's metonymic
and metaphorical qualities. This helped me place it in a context of what I
already knew in cog-ling. But I'm really digressing here. It's a good book for
a non-academic audience. And this review is kinda click baity.

------
acheron
"What are letters?"

"Kinda like mediaglyphs except they're all black, and they're tiny, they don't
move, they're old and boring and really hard to read."

\-- The Diamond Age (Neal Stephenson)

~~~
graphitezepp
Read that book just as use of emoji stuff started becoming visible in my
circles. Made this quote feel like an intensely accurate predictive statement
at the time.

------
emodendroket
I mean, maybe I'm alone here, but I find it a little upsetting we can't have
country-specific variants of Chinese characters because it'd take up too much
code space, but we can have a gazillion emoji.

------
lifthrasiir
> Both Evans and Danesi set out to explain [...] why we can ignore naysayers
> who cite them as another example of the erosion of standards.

The use of inline pictographs to enrich the text is not bad by itself and
actually well supported by their arguments. We had them in instant messengers
and chatting systems for a long time. But it is a completely different matter
to put them into the Unicode standard.

The original set of Emoji was highly culture-dependent (for examle there had
been only 10 country flags, as those were the most relevant countries to
Japaneses---Unicode correctly recognized this problem and yet picked a bad
solution!), defined by glyphs and not by its supposed meaning unlike most
scripts in Unicode (that's still true today, and we are still suffering from
different Emoji glyphs for multiple vendors), and could be very quickly
declining in use for whatever reason (like emoticons trending and declining).

So Emoji is quite unsuitable for encoding without a compelling reason. Here
the compelling reason turned out to be the interoperability with Japanese
carriers [1], and that's why Emoji is an inevitable but ugly addition to the
Unicode standard. I feel it is correct to claim both that (the contemporary
usage of) Emoji is a great cultural trend and that (the Unicode addition of)
Emoji is absurd.

[1] The original proposal
[http://www.unicode.org/L2/L2009/09025r2-emoji.pdf](http://www.unicode.org/L2/L2009/09025r2-emoji.pdf)
is very clear in this regard.

~~~
TazeTSchnitzel
> Unicode correctly recognized this problem and yet picked a bad solution

What do you dislike about their solution?

> Emoji is an inevitable but ugly addition of the Unicode standard

In fairness, Unicode has long had emoticons. Emoji merely expanded its
repertoire.

~~~
lifthrasiir
> What do you dislike about their solution?

Regional indicators (two of them compose to a flag Emoji) can make many
Unicode operations inefficient. For example in the grapheme cluster
segmentation it should pair two regional indicators [1], so with a very long
run of regional indicators it is impossible to partially apply the
segmentation (which is often the case). There really should have been two
pairs of regional indicators, the first used for the first letter and the
second used for the second letter---just like surrogate pairs.

[1]
[http://www.unicode.org/reports/tr29/tr29-31.html#GB12](http://www.unicode.org/reports/tr29/tr29-31.html#GB12)

> In fairness, Unicode has long had emoticons. Emoji merely expanded its
> repertoire.

Well, Unicode also has dingbats for the compatibility. I don't blame the
Unicode consortium for the decision. I do blame those nasty Japanese carriers
for permanently harming the Unicode standard though :-)

------
Animats
There are way too many emoji, but Unicode can handle them. We need to keep
them out of things that have to be typed correctly - domain names, URLs,
usernames, passwords, and variable names. Other than that, they're harmless,
except that everything now has to handle the astral planes. Most of the emoji
are 3-byte Unicode characters.

How are IOS 11 animated emoji encoded for transmission?

~~~
jwilk
Huh. What do you mean by "3-byte Unicode characters"?

~~~
grzm
An example is UTF-8, where code points are encoded in 1 to 4 8-bit bytes. You
can read more about UTF-8 here:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UTF-8#Description](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UTF-8#Description)

------
eukara
Reading this article I got reminded of Google's hairy heart emoji...
[https://emojipedia.org/google/android-4.4/yellow-
heart/](https://emojipedia.org/google/android-4.4/yellow-heart/)

------
jwilk
Archived copy, which can be read without JS enabled:

[https://archive.is/tID3G](https://archive.is/tID3G)

