The rise of emoji

> In The Emoji Code, Vyvyan Evans takes aim at the Unicode Consortium, painting it as an institution in the mould of the Académie française, tyranically subjugating the linguistic will of the people by restricting their free use of cartoon icons, behind it all compelled by Silicon Valley corporate greed, since the members of its technical committee include such blue-chip tech companies as Apple, Google, Facebook and IBM.

This is bullshit. I just finished reading this book and Evans does nothing of the sort.

Evans is a respected linguist who takes his training and applies it to emoji. I also have some training in linguistics and the only thing that really bothered me about the book is that it wasn't academic enough. I thought it was a bit too pop-sci, but this just means it wasn't written with people like me in mind. It was written for a more lay audience and that's OK. Evans does a very good job of explaining complex subjects to people without any prior exposure to academic linguistics. In general, The Emoji Code is a good book. I just would have preferred something a bit deeper.

The real strength in Evans book for me was his discussion of Emoji's metonymic and metaphorical qualities. This helped me place it in a context of what I already knew in cog-ling. But I'm really digressing here. It's a good book for a non-academic audience. And this review is kinda click baity.

"What are letters?"

"Kinda like mediaglyphs except they're all black, and they're tiny, they don't move, they're old and boring and really hard to read."

-- The Diamond Age (Neal Stephenson)

I mean, maybe I'm alone here, but I find it a little upsetting we can't have country-specific variants of Chinese characters because it'd take up too much code space, but we can have a gazillion emoji.

> Both Evans and Danesi set out to explain [...] why we can ignore naysayers who cite them as another example of the erosion of standards.

The use of inline pictographs to enrich the text is not bad by itself and actually well supported by their arguments. We had them in instant messengers and chatting systems for a long time. But it is a completely different matter to put them into the Unicode standard.

The original set of Emoji was highly culture-dependent (for examle there had been only 10 country flags, as those were the most relevant countries to Japaneses---Unicode correctly recognized this problem and yet picked a bad solution!), defined by glyphs and not by its supposed meaning unlike most scripts in Unicode (that's still true today, and we are still suffering from different Emoji glyphs for multiple vendors), and could be very quickly declining in use for whatever reason (like emoticons trending and declining).

So Emoji is quite unsuitable for encoding without a compelling reason. Here the compelling reason turned out to be the interoperability with Japanese carriers [1], and that's why Emoji is an inevitable but ugly addition to the Unicode standard. I feel it is correct to claim both that (the contemporary usage of) Emoji is a great cultural trend and that (the Unicode addition of) Emoji is absurd.

[1] The original proposal http://www.unicode.org/L2/L2009/09025r2-emoji.pdf is very clear in this regard.

There are way too many emoji, but Unicode can handle them. We need to keep them out of things that have to be typed correctly - domain names, URLs, usernames, passwords, and variable names. Other than that, they're harmless, except that everything now has to handle the astral planes. Most of the emoji are 3-byte Unicode characters.

How are IOS 11 animated emoji encoded for transmission?

Reading this article I got reminded of Google's hairy heart emoji... https://emojipedia.org/google/android-4.4/yellow-heart/

Archived copy, which can be read without JS enabled:

https://archive.is/tID3G