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Comment by yanowitz | Hacker News Reader

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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> 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.

>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.

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