East Asian character emojis – “the fuller” story | Hacker News Reader

East Asian character emojis – “the fuller” story

chenhuijing.com

71 pointsjmadsen33 comments

At least in Korea, people don't really use inline emoji characters much - but they use stickers (larger, often animated cartoon images of characters in a variety of emotional stances or life situations, some with associated personalities or relationships with each other) a whole ton. They serve a variety of purposes, e.g. responding with a summary of what the other person said to signal understanding/empathy/compassion, teasing, flirting ... there's a lot of joy in maintaining and using a sticker collection actually, picking the right sticker for an occasion is a unique form of eloquence to collectively revel in. It's a big celebration of reading a room, wit and quick thinking, just using images. It's some of the most joyful creative writing around, I think. People also wind up adopting certain characters as "theirs" in a group chat, so it adds to identity.

After I played my first JRPG, I notice every time a game tries to be at all role playing without showing character emotion images next to dialog. I would never have imagined it adding so much had someone just described it. What you describe sounds like the same thing in a different context.

This article seems to completely miss the reason these were created as emoji - they were encoded for use on the Japanese mobile web so that phones wouldn't have to keep downloading images for "this train has free seats","loading this site is free of data charges" and "apply for this event" etc. They weren't meant for private use but for commercial use.

I got the impression that the han symbols introduced here were originally NOT in the emoji charsets ("NTT DoCoMo Pictographs" etc.), but come from the "Japanese TV Symbols (ARIB)" charset. That means that they aren't originally used in mobile phones, but in TV receivers. (Digital programming guide, subtitles etc.) They were only included in the emoji range later, when they became a part of Unicode.

I know the symbols were present on the mobile web, but I could be mistaken about them actually being encoded as Emoji. I have a couple ancient gala-kei lying around, I'll see if I can find one of the proprietary chargers and fire one up tomorrow to research.

A quick google reveals this docomo<>au translation chart from 2008 with 空 and 満 http://kiironinaritai.com/store/emoji/emoji_docomo_au.gif

And this page also from 2008 with a SoftBank table with 有, 無, 特, 割, ココ, サ etc http://m-pe.tv/u/page.php?uid=emoji0427&id=2

edit: the fact that 満,空 and 指 are right next to the "seat" emoji in the softbank private encoding reinforces what I remembered about them being used for mobile booking sites

Okay, maybe I was wrong then about those being from ARIB. I used to use an old gara-kei too not further than a few years ago (I think it was 2012), and indeed, there were some han emojis on mobile too.

Everything is further muddied by the fact that the three operators all had incompatible emoji sets, all squirreled away in unused parts of Shift-JIS. IIRC, first docomo launched emoji, then someone else came out with "look we have animated emoji!", then the next company had to launch multicolor emoji, "oh but now OUR new model has an extra 150 emoji!"

I'm sure some of the ones that ended up in Unicode came from ARIB, but others were cobbled together from the operator sets.

> the three operators all had incompatible emoji sets, all squirreled away in unused parts of Shift-JIS

It was even worse than that originally: NTT DoCoMo used private-use ranges in both Unicode and SHIFT-JIS, au used embedded IMG tags in arbitrary text content and SoftBank bracketed emoji codes in SI/SO escapes.

Someone who is white and living in Eastern Europe I find comments like these deeply offensive:

> overwhelmingly male, overwhelming white and overwhelmingly engineers

This is me, but why does every article picture me as someone who has power and decision maker. Do I have to feel bad that I am male, white and engineer? I have seen hunger, REAL povery, communism, I make less than your McDonalds worker in U.S now and my standard of living is low compared to developed world. Why do I have to always read something is wrong with me?

I don't think your frustration is warranted in this context, and context matters. The statement (a quote used by the article) was making a claim as to the staff involved with the expansion of Unicode being too homogeneous. If true, this could realistically pose a problem. I have some first-hand experience with this: I'm male, white and an engineer as well, but I'm also an immigrant in an East Asian country. Doing so and acquiring local cultural competency involved learning many things that weren't readily available to be learned in my European country of origin. It's therefore very credible to me that to serve a global audience, Unicode would benefit from a diverse staff trained in diverse environments due the way skills and knowledge are distributed.

In other words, no, there isn't anything wrong with being male, white and an engineer (and nothing in the text says so, btw), but there might be (or have been; the article describes a shake-up in the process thereafter) a problem with decision makers at Unicode overwhelmingly fitting those specs. I think you can easily make the argument for diverse representation in this use case.

This would of course benefit from the viewpoint of someone more familiar with the makeup of the Unicode Consortium.

It is just that every third article I read here on HN tells me so. I guess it's not frustration over only this particular article. But if people talk about diversity and tolerance, they should remind themselves that not all white people have the same privilege as you do over there.

Where I live(d) I wasn't (and still don't) have an opportunity to open a developer account to so I can submit my (free) app to the store. I wasn't able to publish my app. I had to travel and go through horror making a bank account in another country just so I could submit an app to app store.

I haven't had any influence over other people or groups, neither did my grand grand grand parents. I'm sick and tired reading from half of the tech (!!!!) article that all white men have some magical privilege.

In general, when folks talk of white privilege it's more nuanced than "all white folk are privileged". I recommend going through http://www.huffingtonpost.com/gina-crosleycorcoran/explainin... , which explains privilege from the POV of someone who felt that they didn't have any. It touches on intersectionality -- privilege depends on more than one thing, and you may have privilege due to one aspect of your life that gets negated due to others. This does mean that someone in your exact situation without that aspect might be worse off. This doesn't mean that you will be universally better off than folks who do not share that aspect.

The concept of intersectionality is pretty well known and most of the folks talking of diversity seem to be aware of it. Partially the communications breakdown is caused by terminology; someone who understands this will interpret the term "privilege" to include the nuanced nature of intersectionality. Folks unaware of this will interpret it the straightforward way and feel slighted. Such terminology discrepancies are nothing new; an in-group usually will understand words differently from the outgroup.

Well, Huffington Post is a terrible newspaper.

But the first thing it tells is the privilege of country you were born at, meaning I'm less privileged than most of you here and maybe I shouldn't be oppressed all the time with these articles.

Citing the article itself, the writers of the stories I'm complaining about don't see their own privilege and should stop using term white straight men because it's oppressive against 200mil or more white people currently living in the ex soviet block!

Yes, I know I'm a little pissed right now, but go and check your damn privilege, because I travelled to another country to submit my app to appstore. The app failed miserably by the way.

Again, this is the point of intersectionality. You do not have the privilege of being born in the US (or other such places). Understood. That is exactly the point the article was trying to make, privilege is not a simple concept of "you are white, ergo you are universally better off". Like I said, someone non-white in your situation might be worse off, however (not always, again, privilege is not a blanket statement). It's relative, and other aspects of your life may negate the privilege.

The pointing out of privilege is not an attack. It can be wrong some times, but don't take it as an attack.

> should stop using term white straight men

Perhaps. Like I said, the terminology means something different to the in-group. Many folks implicitly understand it in the context of intersectionality. These folks do not mean to say that all white men are bad or all white men have absolute privilege. It's something more nuanced.

I understand the point you're trying to make but it's like saying don't take these black crime statistics seriously, some black people are actually very nice. Look at this one nice NBA player. Pointing our x rape statistics is nothing but and x race shouldn't take it personally! It can be nasty sometimes but you should take it personally. Jesus christ this sounds like Donald Trump! I give you this example only because you're an American. Does two wrongs make one right just like in maths?

Just like the privilege dogma itself preaches, the people who spread should stop using such terms. Practice what you preach. I don't find anything nuanced taking massive group of people and repeating they are all doing or have done bad things.

The point Manisearth is trying to make is that "having privilege" is not the same as "doing bad things" and also not the same as "having privilege in all things". You're at this point choosing to be offended by reading something indiscriminately that, when used well, isn't being used indiscriminately, but in a context.

> I don't find anything nuanced taking massive group of people and repeating they are all doing or have done bad things.

At no point did I do that. I said that privilege it not an attack. I said that it doesn't imply that you are doing bad things.

All it means that there's a good chance that the particular aspect of your identity may have given you a leg up over others who are identical to you in all other respects. That doesn't mean you've done a bad thing, it's just something that's worth recognizing. It doesn't mean that you're universally better off, either; like I said that's the point of intersectionality -- you can have some privilege due to one aspect of your life which is completely eclipsed by another aspect of your life, e.g. not living in the U.S.

I can't understand the first half of your comment at all. Tending to agree with sho_hn that you're basically trying to be offended here.

Yeah, I just think this isn't one of those, and we have to be specific, or we're just generically angry, and that's not super-fruitful.

The thing is, your personal experience (people believing things about you just based on the color of your skin, their minds being made up; feeling like you're going into things with a disadvantage based on how you are seen; being powerless to argue your way out) is absolutely valid, but it's also how lots of other people feel (immigrants all over the world, displaced people, minorities in any country, etc. - often disadvantaged in business, hiring, dating, ...). I think white people in wealthy western countries currently really do tend to feel this sort of systemic prejudice the least in their lives, due to demographics and history, and often can't empathize with the problem well. I perhaps couldn't myself before I became an immigrant and ran into circles where I'm stereotyped negatively (super jarring experience, but valuable). Some of the outrage and prejudice you see - and it can be off the mark - is a reaction to that, and it's often specific to a situation you're outside of (e.g. race relations in the US of A), and from authors not considering any other situation for lack of knowledge or experience.

The bottom line is that it's a whole bunch of breakdowns of empathy all around and in all directions, including towards you. But the cool thing is that this kinda equips you with empathy special powers so you can try to improve things by being an effective communicator about these things.

I think it's the other way round --- not that white men tend to be privileged (many aren't), but that privileged people tend to be white men (many are).

It's provincialism: the assumption that your audience is in the US or Western Europe. There is an implicit "Overwhelmingly American" in the beginning of that list. Understood in that context, it is not an unreasonable statement: in that world this describes a traditionally privileged group.

In this particular article, however, it doesn't even matter that this group is powerful. The quote is meant to juxtapose the group of people deciding about emoji vs. the majority of the world. It's got a flaw in it, in that the majority of Emojis were decided by people overwhelming male and overwhelmingly Japanese :)

But back to your core complaint: I think you're right that you shouldn't have to read something is wrong with you. I think you're collateral damage in what is an overall valuable attempt to get people that share those characteristics but also have more power and privilege than you to experience some discomfort. As I said initially, I think you're collateral damage because of people's shortsightedness even as their intentions are often (certainly not always) good. I was born in the USSR and well understand this angle. Everyone unfortunately has their blind spots.

> Do I have to feel bad that I am male, white and engineer?

No.

> Why do I have to always read something is wrong with me?

That's not what it was saying. There is something wrong with decision makers being homogeneous, this does not imply that the group the decision makers are from has something wrong with it.

> why does every article picture me as someone who has power and decision maker

Also not what it was saying. In many fields decision makers are overwhelmingly white/male, this does not imply the converse that most white men are decision makers (or have power, or are well off).

------------

The article recognizes that most folks in the unicode consortium are white men. That is a fact[1]. It further implies that this homogeneity is bad for Unicode, since a lack of perspective may lead to decisions that don't work out well for some languages.

[1]: However, the UC does consult with corresponding groups in individual countries when working specifically with a language. It's debatable whether or not this is enough to bring in perspective (especially in relation to things like CJK unification)

You don't have to feel bad. But you should be aware that decisions made by groups that are overwhelmingly white male engineers are likely to be the best decisions for white male engineers rather than the population as a whole, and having more diversity in the decision making process increases the probability that better decisions will be made.

If you chose to read into it that way, then maybe there is something wrong with you.

I mean, I'm a relatively wealthy white American male engineer with plenty of privilege (in this context and others), but it doesn't offend me to be described that way. Why should it? It's an actionable and useful perspective on culture. Being offended, however, is not.

It's just good old-fashioned prejudice. Because you have attributes X, Y, and Z, you must therefore be a bad person.

If the shoe fits, wear it.

And if it doesn't... don't?

It's a bit odd (and sad) that the "Where is the Dumpling Emoji" project — or the corresponding section of TFA — makes no reference whatsoever to the previous Unicode Power Symbol project[0] which was also a grassroot effort to get "missing" emoji into the standard (in that case the IEC Power Symbols ⏻ ⏼ ⏽ and ⏾ with the "Power Off" symbol reusing the pre-existing ⭘ "HEAVY CIRCLE" codepoint), although it was obviously more reduced in scope and lifespan.

[0] http://unicodepowersymbol.com

It would be really cool to have anglicized transliterations of these, as a standardized expression notation, with tool-tip call-outs.

The reason I say this, is because I have no idea what "🈯️" is, if it appears within a body of text, in isolation.

Something like:

  !:symbolic-character-name:

or:

  [symbol]character-name[/symbol]

Think about the boundaries in communication something like that might smash. (...or inadvertently create, I hope not!)

Sounds like a good browser extension to me.

I'd also like to have filters and conversions to preserve reasonable ideographs (e.g. ㊗), but optionally swap in a plain-text equivalent when warranted.

Having dabbled with the ARIB subtitling and data submission formats a bit myself, I can't help but think, who thought that it'd be a good idea to embed those symbols to the character encoding? Surely there's a room for a higher-level structured language that has tags, escape codes or some other markup, and allows for extensibility and ease of use. Keep the concerns separate!

In the Japanese TV broadcast standard, subtitles can embed bitmap versions of kanji (generally only used for rare names or icons like "phone ringing"), but due to bandwidth and TV hardware cost limitations they're very low-res, whereas the encoded characters can be replaced by the TV with built-in high-res fonts. Perhaps a protocol designed in 2016 would use vectors instead.

IIRC DVDs use 2-bit bitmap overlays, which is why DVD ripping software has to use OCR to get softsubs.

That still doesn't answer why these particular characters needed their own character. For instance, 🈯 U+1F22F [0] is really just a stylized version of 指 U+6307 [1] [2].

On a likely related note, the Enclosed Ideographic Supplement [3] seems simmilarly redundent, being composed of characters such as 🈯 which, again, should be a modification of of the basic 指 character. It is not like Unicode does not support modifying characters.

EDIT: not "likely related" the emoji character described in the article is just 🈯. This character is called called "Squared Cjk Unified Ideograph-6307".

[0] http://unicode.org/emoji/charts/full-emoji-list.html#1f22f

[1] https://unicode-table.com/en/6307/

[2] Insert rant about Han unification

[3] https://unicode-table.com/en/blocks/enclosed-ideographic-sup...

My guess would be because of semantics. The plain version is the character itself used in text. The squared version is a specific symbol used in television for "designated hitter". It's the same reason that there are unicode characters that looks exactly like latin characters, except they're in different unicode blocks. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homoglyph#Unicode_homoglyphs)

It will be for compatibility with those old encodings.

Otherwise, these two codepoints should be used:

U+6307 CJK UNIFIED IDEOGRAPH-6307

U+20DE COMBINING ENCLOSING SQUARE

To give this: 指⃞

That can work on any character, and there are other enclosing options:

X⃝ circle

X⃞ square

X⃟ diamond

X⃠ backslash circle

X⃢ screen

X⃣ keycap

X⃤ triangle

So we can make an escape key: ␛⃣

U+241B SYMBOL FOR ESCAPE; U+20E3 COMBINING ENCLOSING KEYCAP

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