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Emojipedia.org

emojipedia.org

80 pointsnkjoep57 comments

I'm fascinated by people who think emoji could someday be a more universal way of communication given all of its inherent ambiguity. My off-the-top-of-my-head example was the prayer emoji, which has popularly been said to be a mistranslation of a purported "high five": http://www.deseretnews.com/article/865606309/This-emoji-may-...

But as Emojipedia points out, the Unicode definition is "person with folded hands". As a Westerner, I'm inclined to associate this with "prayer". But since we have the Japanese to largely thank for emoji in the first place, shouldn't this emoji be seen as "please" or "thank you"?

http://emojipedia.org/person-with-folded-hands/

And if you look at that Emojipedia entry, you start to appreciate the cluaterfuck of things lost in translation. Not only is the gesture of folded hands of varied meanings across cultures, but each software vendor adds their own interpretation.

Compare Samsung's rendering:

http://emojipedia-us.s3.amazonaws.com/cache/f7/f4/f7f45466d6...

With HTCs: http://emojipedia-us.s3.amazonaws.com/cache/97/d6/97d6ea79e4...

Admittedly, emojis are more immediately expressive than, say, learning a whole other written language. But the amount of ambiguity and confusion ultimately remains the same IMO

It can still be a universal language - it will just have different dialects.

Yes. Emojis are a pictorial representation. Even some scripts of early civilization used communicate via pictures. Plus emojis-like symbols are even used by autistic kids. There is an app in ipad with all pictures that they use to communicate what they want.

Limiting our vocabulary to that of cavemen or children with limited capabilities is not a step forward in evolution. At least not one I'm looking forward to.

Nobody is arguing for limiting our communication to only emoji, but augmenting it with emoji.

Sometimes I want to write an essay, other times I just want to text a poop emoji+sad face to a friend because he's being a shithead.

They can both exist happily in the same world.

How can it be universal when the images not only have wildly different meanings across cultures, but are subject to another layer of interpretation by device? The message you send via iMessage is going to look much different to a recipient who is using a HTC phone.

And this isn't even getting into the politics that govern which expressions merit inclusion: https://www.wired.com/2016/08/apples-new-squirt-gun-emoji-hi...

who says high-five is a mistranslation of prayer? communal prayer

Hahaha I can't believe there are downvotes for offering an explanation that makes the symbolic use in this way comprehensible. Too wed to the satisfaction of being sure it's a misuse as if this process of negotiation over meaning isn't how language is created. Nonsense is where new sense is discovered. I downvote your downvotes, at last a conversation.

I'm fascinated by people who think emoji could someday be a more universal way of communication given all of its inherent ambiguity.

There are many people who do not have enough command of their own native language to avoid ambiguity. Sometimes I find this very frustrating, but for the most part they seem happy to misunderstand and be misunderstood, so I try my best to let it go and move on.

There are also people with enough command of their own native language to introduce ambiguities on purpose, which I sometimes find fascinating.

I do this with punctuation. I tell my students that by default, I'll use exclamation marks when empty boilerplate phrases regardless of my actual enthusiasm, e.g. "Sounds good!". For students whom I am more familiar with and don't need the fakery, I'll settle for "Sounds good.". But depending on how petty and irritable I am at the moment, maybe the closing period will be used as a passive-aggressive way of implying, "No, that does not really 'sound good'.", and you'll just have to guess!

After awhile, students appreciate the way programming language interpreters immediately and decisively raise errors on even the simplest typos and syntax errors.

Indeed, but I find that I am happier when I assume everyone is being honest. When in doubt I just ask pedantic questions. Dishonest people usually have tells when you take them off script, even though they rarely admit it.

It gets even messier when politics are involved. See Apple and the gun emoji.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12240386

http://emojipedia.org/shrug/ is my go-to example. I see about 4 or 5 very starkly different meanings among the different versions. Everything from, "Durrr I dunno?" to "What the hell is your problem, dude?"

I really like the Cookie emoji. Seemingly every vendor agrees on it being a chocolate chip cookie, yet Samsung decides it should be a cracker instead.

http://emojipedia.org/cookie/

I apologize for the kinda off topic reply; I have no idea why but Google's cookie emoji triggered me into an uncontrollable laughter. It looks so low effort, it's amazing.

And these personified emojis go completely against the grain of iconification. Graphical icons become more culturally universal the less detailed they are. The standard example is that the :) emoji is seen by everyone as being of their own race, yet we have to have skin-tone variations on these highly detailed sorts of emojis to have the same level of inclusion of the traditional version.

I've noticed this in app stores recently. The vast majority of games have these highly detailed, action oriented icons. It's impossible to pick one out from the other. They all look like they've been made by the same company.

Just because we have high-resolution displays, doesn't mean we have to use all of those pixels.

According to "theory of meaning",

In “General Semantics,” David Lewis wrote

I distinguish two topics: first, the description of possible languages or grammars as abstract semantic systems whereby symbols are associated with aspects of the world; and, second, the description of the psychological and sociological facts whereby a particular one of these abstract semantic systems is the one used by a person or population. Only confusion comes of mixing these two topics.

[1] : https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/meaning/

See that's when I think emoji shine - trying to convey ambiguity over text. In person a shrug can mean a few things, some of which might be harder to say explicitly, for social or mechanical reasons, and an emoji seems preferable to *shrug or (shrug). I think that disambiguating all of the emojis or even continuing to expand the dictionary so much would make it boring. If the emoji meant the word exactly I'd just type the word, it's much easier than trying to find the right emoji.

U+1F481 INFORMATION DESK PERSON is often used to mean "bye Felicia" or similar. The emoji's helpful, knowledgeable pose is frequently interpreted as confident, dismissive sassiness.

I think the book "Book from the Ground" by Xu Bing shows what can be done with an emoji-only format. I found the book on a whim at a used book store, and found it a fascinating "read".

Excerpts: http://asiasociety.org/blog/asia/always-pioneer-artist-xu-bi...

The hand thing is 'thank you' in Thailand at least.

Ha! I was interpreting it as "namaste".

The University of Minnesota did a study on cross-device emoji interpretation.

https://grouplens.org/blog/investigating-the-potential-for-m...

Many of the really common emojis have very different emotional connotations on different devices. For example "Grinning Face with Smiling Eyes" is viewed much more negatively by Apple users -- probably because the face looks like its grimacing, rather than grinning.

I was exactly here yesterday after a discussion with a friend of mine about the meaning of "Face With Steam From Nose" [1].

I work in an academic institute with many nationalities and almost all people (of different cultural backgrounds) describe this emoticon as an emoticon showing anger and frustration. Yet the official description in Unicode 6.0 [2] is "face with look of triumph" . Was it simply bad design?

[1] http://emojipedia.org/face-with-look-of-triumph/ [2] http://unicode.org/charts/PDF/Unicode-6.0/U60-1F600.pdf

I am curious, have you found other similar examples?

> Was it simply bad design?

No, just a cultural difference. Most of the early emoji in Unicode were drawn from the existing set of emoji already in use in Japanese telecom. As such, these emoji have a strong Japanese cultural bias in their original meanings.

One of the goals of Unicode is to be able to encode text from existing encodings. In (informal) Japanese communication these emoji were in use, so Unicode encoded them.

Readers of Japanese comics are probably familiar with most of these facial expressions, including that triumphant look. The Samsung one on emojipedia is probably closest to that emoji's archetype.

Indeed, the Samsung one was the only one I found "triumphant"! ;)

But as I said, I asked around our Institute where we are from different nationalities and continents. No one said it was triumphant and actually they were quite surprised of its "official" description.

I don't have an answer, but emojis seem to have been inspired by the Japanese culture. Perhaps steam from the nose is a common Japanese representation of victory?

I get that emojis were first invented for use on Japanese phones, but I don't understand why they kept them Japanese oriented when merged into Unicode? There's ideographs [1], acronyms that are relevant only to JP [2] and fish on a pole [3]

Surely we could've made better use of the Unicode space to use a common set of symbol shared by all cultures.

1: http://emojipedia.org/squared-cjk-unified-ideograph-7981/

2: http://emojipedia.org/squared-ng/

3: http://emojipedia.org/carp-streamer/

> Surely we could've made better use of the Unicode space […]

There is plenty of space.

Keep in mind that one of the goals of Unicode is to be able to represent existing corpora of text by means of a global standard. Emoji were in widespread use in Japanese mobile phones long before smartphones existed; that alone legitimises their presence in the Unicode standard.

Like a dictionary, the Unicode standard is in a large part descriptive rather than prescriptive. It catalogues what is in use, not what ought to be used. However, recent emoji contributions do seem to have been made in the spirit of filling lacunae in the set.

That actually happens a lot with English but native English speakers (or those foreigners with similar langs/cultures) normally don't realize that it is happening.

Defining world culture symbols would be pretty hard. If you count by number of people there'd be a lot more Asian cultural things than you would expect.

Japan has a lot of cultural differences in their iconography.

I was surprised a lot when Apple changed the grinning face emoji in iOS 10 to a boring smile. For me and my friends the original version was a sort of mischivious smile, but definitely positive. Seems a ton of people had negative connotations with it, and it got voted out by majority opinion. The new one conveys a totally different meaning for me, and as such I have basically stopped using it. I tend to use "Face With Stuck-Out Tongue & Winking Eye" now instead...

Also: browsing Emojipedia I just realised that the Smirking Face is supposed to be smirking... I always interpreted it as annoyed or bored... talk about ambiguity...

If you have a textbox on the internet, eventually some special snowflake will put emoji into it. And one day, you'll wake up to your backend systems on fire, because someone decided that their name was the smiling pile of poop emoji.[0] (Are your backend systems jealous that someone else is named that?)

I've recently needed to make some fields emoji-proof. This seems like a great resource for testing. Thanks for sharing.

[0] http://emojipedia.org/pile-of-poo/

Happened to me. It uncovered Java's handling of surrogate pairs. I fixed my code, because it was technically broken before.

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/42457416/jq-cant-parse-an...

Reminds me of when I wrote an app to track and store tweets about a given hashtag. Worked fine in its first few months, then started throwing encoding errors right around the time Twitter enabled emoji support. I was using MySQL as a data store and was ignorant to the fact that UTF8 encoding in MySQL only uses 3 bytes. I was ignorant about encoding in general but thought that UTF8 always meant 4-bytes. Apparently so did many other MySQL users, and it was bad enough that MySQL questions on Stackoverflow are already filled with erroneous info about all kinds of encoding issues.

The search for the fix -- which is that MySQL has a utf8mb4 encoding for 4-bytes -- was probably the most frustrating debugging exercise in my career. Even worse was the eventual revelation that the MySQL devs were technically right -- the UTF8 spec says nothing about requiring 4 bytes, and 3 bytes probably seemed sensible enough in terms of efficiency at the time of MySQL 4.

From RFC-3629 [1] (the UTF8 spec), on page 4:

  In UTF-8, characters from the U+0000..U+10FFFF range (the UTF-16 
  accessible range) are encoded using sequences of 1 to 4 octets.

It would be absurd for an encoding that's used by 88.9% of the web [2] to be implemented in a way that doesn't respect the standard.

[1] https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc3629#page-5

[2] https://www.wikiwand.com/en/UTF-8

Never mind the internet, users will lock themselves out of their own computer: https://apple.stackexchange.com/questions/202143/i-included-...

Users? That looks like Apple's fault for allowing that asymmetry in Mac OS.

I am thankful for emoji's existence in part because it's forcing Western app developers to actually support non-BMP Unicode codepoints.

I don't understand why emojis should be customizable with skin colors. And five of them nonetheless. If discriminating based on skin color is racist, why do we invent new ways to do it? I'd rather use a single color for everyone (don't care which) because I don't want to express "a black man smiling", I want to express "a man smiling".

Yeah this makes much more sense. Implementers can localise if they want but skin colour isn't that important.

I should totally be able to long press on dog emoji for a breed selector though.

> (don't care which)

> I don't want to express "a black man smiling"

Which is it?

Green would be fine.

Are you deliberately avoiding the rest of what he wrote? The point is that he doesn't care to involve color at all, having only one color would remove the "it's color X smiling" choice.

Just use the default yellow colour then.

This ignores the context that emojis came from. All of the people depicted were light skinned. Emojis didn't start neutral and gain ethnic skin colors. They started light-skinned and gained a neutral color -- and the choice to select other skin colors.

Emojimakers do not seem to understand that there is a difference between big smiles.

For example, this [1] big smile represents a totally different emotion than [2].

Now look at the "grinning face" set of emoticons [3], which represents a total grab-bag of emotions. You really can't reliably use emoticons these days.

[1] https://img.myloview.es/fotomurales/gran-sonrisa-con-dientes...

[2] http://www.clipartkid.com/images/101/smiley-face-clip-art-em...

[3] http://emojipedia.org/grinning-face/

Emojipedia is a great resource, I use it frequently to find emojis by name.

Interesting insight into the emoji approval process (podcast): https://food52.com/blog/19350-why-is-there-no-pie-emoji

Also: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11958682

Wow. I never thought all those emojis were implemented on so many different platforms.

Are there official specs? Who designed the original emojis everyone else copied?

They fall under the Unicode standard. Warning, this page is quite big!

http://unicode.org/emoji/charts/full-emoji-list.html

I believe they originated with Japanese mobile phone providers?

can't believe it made it to hn front page. HackerNews works in mysterious ways.

Are all emojis just unicode?

Depends on what you mean by emoji, but all of the emoji you can use on smartphones and in social media tend to be part of the Unicode standard. They are like any other Unicode character; i.e., they have their own codepoint assigned, and can be represented in a valid Unicode encoding such as UTF-8. Some can be modified with modifying characters (skin colour is a modifiable attribute these days), but this too is not a new feature (e.g., combining diacritic characters do this too, although mostly you would just use the composed variants (like é) instead).

Reply on news.ycombinator.com