
Will emoji become a new language? - d_a_robson
http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20151012-will-emoji-become-a-new-language
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V-2
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).

~~~
teekert
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.

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

Yes.

> (continued) anything subjective should be.

No.

~~~
V-2
Subjective is fine, but good practice is keeping factual news and comments
separate / distinguishable. Obviously comments are subjective by nature.

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yanowitz
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).

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x3al
>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.

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aninhumer
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.

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cbowal
A classic example of Betteridge's Law of Headlines.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge%27s_law_of_headline...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge%27s_law_of_headlines)

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to3m
Though emoji is a young language, it already has great literature:
[http://www.emojidick.com/](http://www.emojidick.com/)

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

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nakedrobot2
Predicted in the Diamond Age, it was called "mediaglyphs" I believe. (Or was
that in Anathem?)

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

[https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/290233-what-are-letters-
kin...](https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/290233-what-are-letters-kinda-like-
mediaglyphics-except-they-re-all-black)

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pc2g4d
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.

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guard-of-terra
If they will, it will be not much easier to master than Chinese.

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truebosko
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.

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

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weatherlight
Isn't that APL?

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anotherLevel
Betteridge's Law.

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

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dccoolgai
Darmok and Jalad at Tanagra.

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

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

Oh wait we were talking about emojis.

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

