Why emojis are failing to evolve into a form of language | Hacker News Reader

Why emojis are failing to evolve into a form of language

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30 pointssuhastech43 comments

Emojis/emoticons shouldn't become a form of language, thats because they're meant to be something else closer to punctuation. They're really in-line annotation glyphs that add context, meaning and emotion to writing which enables clarity.

They can almost be thought of as parenthetical asides which are intended by the writer to aid the reader in understanding tone and emotion in a compact way.

For example, which form unambiguously conveys sarcasm the best?

"Oh, it's Sam, isn't that great!"

"Oh, it's Sam, isn't that great! (jerk)"

Now replace (jerk) with an appropriate glyph and we're at emojis.

What written language sorely lacks is a standardized update to the punctuation system we use. We're limited to single digit tone marks and a couple ways of modifying the text to try to convey a tremendous range of tones and emotions. We also need a system that does so without using cartoon characters. It's very hard to convey serious emotional tones with variations of a yellow smiley face.

Western musical notation has an entire series of annotation marks to inform style on top of the basic "sentence" structure of the notes. It seems that writing also could use something similar.

We already have a category for what emoji are: pictographs.

Only if they're used in complete isolation (or as a substitution for writing) and not as an annotation device, which is principally how emojis are used.

That's an orthographic category, not a functional category, for which "interjections" comes close. They are also similar to attitudinals in Lojban.

I think of emojis as the written equivalent of body language and other non-verbal communication.

Yes exactly, they're an encoding attempt at expressing non-verbals and other tone/emotions.

This isn't the first time I've heard someone throw out the idea of emojis as a possible language. It seems popular in certain circles, including a couple of different podcasts I listen to.

Why do people insist on trying to shoehorn emojis into the realm of being a whole languange? Let emojis be emojis. They're not a language. They're not punctuation. They are how we use them.

I'm not a huge fan, but they can be fun and are quite good at conveying certain emotions and empathy. Plus other uses. Why must they be pushed towards use as something that they're not?

Also, how can emojis evolve into a language when they are prescribed by big companies, which provide few updates? Perhaps the set of emojis should be crowdsourced, and we might see some interesting language phenomena.

I see you've never spent much time on deviantart. :) The only limitation there is your ability to remember the right nickname. :iconawesomefaceplz: :iconhappydanceplz:

Standardization by a small group can have a positive effect on a language's evolution. Look at what Webster's dictionary did for English spellings and common usages.

> are quite good at conveying certain emotions and empathy

I don't find this to be true at all. They are missing key elements that convey emotion such as tone and the nuances of facial expression that isn't captured in an icon.

Unlike actual true human facial expressions that we are trained to use and interpret as soon as we are born, emoji usage varies dramatically between people which further dilutes the intended meaning (why did that guy use four smileys in one paragraph? why did she not respond to my emoji?). There's so many ways to misinterpret them because not everyone is using them the same that they lose their chance to be an effective tool to communicate emotion.

Tone and facial expression aren't conveyed at all in non-emojied text. Comparing emojis usage to spoken conversation doesn't make sense because they aren't used to augment or replace speech.

I didn't compare the two. I was explaining that the absence of these things means emoji's don't do a good job of communicating emotion and empathy.

Normal English words also vary widely in their usage, but consistency is often found within tight peer groups. In either case, universalities are still implied or they emerge, whether it is a smiley face to mean a smile or an eggplant for sexual connotation.

I had no idea an eggplant is used as a sexual connotation, which underscores my point that emoji's aren't universally understood.

If your base language is pictographic (ex. Chinese/Japanese) then emoji blend into language. The only problem, not as easy to type "emoji" as it is to type Chinese or Japanese.

For a European language, not so much.

The idea was never that emoji evolve into their own language, but rather compliment our exiting ones -- which they're doing quite well IMHO.

Yeah this is a bit weird, emojis are closer to "new words" than a "new language"

Aside from tongue-in-cheek projects like "translating" Moby Dick into emoji [1], did anyone really think they would become a standalone form of communication?

1: http://emojidick.com/

Wow, $200 for a bound copy of something translated by Mechanical Turk, without any preview at all to see if the content is the least bit interesting. Sounds like a wise use of money.

There's some on their kickstarter page.

Hm. That's pretty rough.

Author of Emoji Dick here. The $200 price tag is that high because its a one-off print-on-demand of an 800 page color laser hardcover book. I would LOVE to find a way to produce these cheaper (even do another edition) but haven't had the time to get a publisher / deal / etc. together.

Sure. But why can't I preview, say, the first chapter?

I never really seriously considered it. Made the book and the page before this was really all that common online. Maybe I'll A/B test it to see if it generates more sales :)

How about a digital copy for less?

Seems like a silly premise to me. Languages with troves of pictorial characters are very difficult to learn, let alone invent collectively.

Tom Scott talked about this when he and Matt Grey made Emojli, the Emoji-only messenger. You can find their talk about it at https://youtube.com/watch?v=GsyhGHUEt-k

However, given that HN is startup central, note that if you are involved in startups and easily offended, you might want to give this video a miss.

By the way, I'm still missing the "face-palm" emoji in Whatsapp. Also missing is an emoji for "not impressed".

At least we finally have a shrug.

‍http://pastebin.com/BvHAx43i (couldn't paste it here)

Missing on your OS probably, since emojis are not Whatsapp-specific.

Whatsapp uses iOS emoji on all platforms

iOS has facepalm emoji (I actually copy-pasted the above from my iPhone's native emoji keyboard).

This reminds me of my girlfriend's tale of her Chinese friend who married an Middle Eastern man. They communicate primarily through emojis, as they're not proficient enough with their shared language, English, to communicate.

I wouldn't take this as a counterpoint to the headline, as they don't seem to communicate very effectively.

I wonder what's the thought process whereby you marry someone you can't communicate effectively with!

She had apparently dated a Chinese man for 10 years and wanted to change it up rather drastically by dating a foreigner.

I...don't know if there was a thought process involved.

They are clearly used so they can’t be a failure.

Perhaps it won’t be long before we see emojis sprinkled throughout printed books (perhaps similar to TV shows popping up texting bubbles). If these icons have value as a way to express something in an interesting way, they probably belong in literature too.

I really don't get this.

Why would emojis evolve into a form of language? It doesn't make any sense whatsoever.

I didn't read the article.

I came here to comment the fun tidbit that emoticons do follow Zipf's law. I know this from emoticons, because I mined some data from Twitter and plotted the frequencies.

My guess is that it's the same for emojis :)

From the post:

Since emojis often bear graphic resemblances to our real faces, the understanding has often been that there would be no problems in interpreting them, and that the sender and the recipient would agree on such interpretation.

As someone fairly immersed in the emoji community, this is a strawman argument (i.e., no one really tries to argue this).

People love and use emoji not in spite of their ambiguity but rather because of it.

Even Unicode encourages emoji to have multiple meanings:

http://unicode.org/emoji/selection.html

Does the candidate emoji have notable metaphorical references or symbolism?

And from their FAQ:

http://www.unicode.org/faq/emoji_dingbats.html

Do emoji characters have single semantics?

A: No. Because emoji characters are treated as pictographs, they are encoded in Unicode based primarily on their general appearance, not on an intended semantic.

Many people want to think there are some folks out there like myself who are seriously arguing Emoji are a language, but this isn't really true. And I say that as the author of a book called "How to Speak Emoji". The thing is, it's a humor book designed to be sold in Urban Outfitters. It's not a real language guide.

If you're curious about more nuanced takes on how emoji are actually being used, here are some good resources:

Tyler Schnoebelen's talk at Emojicon: http://www.slideshare.net/TylerSchnoebelen/emoji-linguistics

Gretchen McCulloch on how Emoji aren't really threatening English: http://the-toast.net/2016/06/29/a-linguist-explains-emoji-an...

The tl;dr: journalists / bloggers would love to get someone to argue that emoji are a language so they can "Well, actually" them, but the truth is this isn't really happening much.

However, some of us are deeply curious about whether our usage of emoji are evolving language-like characteristics and grammars. See this recent research on whether emoji have their own syntax:

https://makingnoiseandhearingthings.com/2016/12/07/do-emojis...

Note that a distinct syntax is probably necessary but not sufficient for emoji to be considered a language.

Long live Wing Dings!

Because NOBODY wants emojis to be a form of language?

Because there is no emoji for "because"

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