Emoji History: The Missing Years | Hacker News Reader

Emoji History: The Missing Years

blog.gingerbeardman.com

141 pointssimonpure62 comments

One of the things that has fascinated me about emoji is that they are a type of character that had been largely unfamiliar to most of the world: ideograms. While their emergence in a country with a well-established ideographic writing system—Japan, kanji—may not be surprising, their widespread adoption in places that had basically used only alphabets is, at least to me.

I wonder to what extent emoji use might evolve so that people without a common spoken language can use them to communicate with each other, the way classical Chinese has historically been used in East Asia. Judging from some emoji-filled comment sections I’ve seen on streaming platforms, it seems that that evolution may have already begun.

Interesting! So far I have seen the opposite - that different sub groups speaking the same language assign different meanings to different emojis, leading to misunderstandings when communicating cross-group. For example, the ubiquitous laugh-to-tears emoji means genuine amusement for some, sarcastic, sometimes even malicious laughter for others.

Isn't it?! There's plenty of talking about how "we're regressing to hieroglyphs", but that doesn't capture the nuance in usage of emojis in different languages.

Your example expands well to old-school emoticons. Where I live, an "xD" serves as a laugh and is used in rather general way. Meanwhile in the Anglosphere it's stereotypically associated with specific demographics

What demographics?

As an American who uses it (well, a variant, XD) and knows where I adopted it, I'll hazard a guess: millennial men who were extremely online in the late 2000s and early 2010s, during the Golden Age of phpBB and before the rise of the smartphone and modern social media.

FWIW phpBB was released in year 2000, just to place that on the timeline.

> I wonder to what extent emoji use might evolve so that people without a common spoken language can use them to communicate with each other

I’m guessing the availability and quality of automatic translators is the limiter in this kind of emoji evolution.

Most of the popular social media platforms already allow their users to translate content (posts, comments, subtitles in video, etc) into their language.

Why translate text to and from languages when we can get across concepts using only emoji? Of course not for everything but for a lot of stuff. Definitely room for both to co-exist.

Emojis capture emotional context. Definitions would track with groups of similar temperament.

My daughter sending me a car emoji has nothing to do with emotional context.

Your ignorance of the content doesn't rule out it's existence

I mean the Internet adopted ASCII emoji like smilies and what not pretty early on from what I know. Also capslock for yelling is pretty widely known but I don't think there is any way other than chat or word of mouth people pick up on a lot of these.

ASCII smilies are not emojis though, they are repurposing other chracters for building emoticons as ASCII art.

Emojis (絵/e = picture, 文字/moji = character) refer to characters that represent a picture of something as a single character.

This is something of a distinction without a difference when we're talking about Western use of ideographic writing in general. Ideographs that are put together from existing symbols are still ideographs if the final shape represents an idea that it also physically resembles. Emoticons were widely used in exactly the same place where we find emoji today, and were conceptually perceived as atomic units, not as colon + parenthesis or whatever.

What makes an emoji different than an emoticon is mostly that some official body gave official recognition to the emoji's existence by adopting it in Unicode and didn't do so for the emoticon.

I think GP is kind of also correct, since emojis were more of first person expressions[1] while emoticons and kaomoji[2] tended to be second person.

1: :seedling:, :eyes:, :bow:, :ok_woman:, ...

2: 顔文字, "face-moji", e.g. `(๑•̀ㅂ•́)و`

I'm not sure that I agree. Maybe the kaomoji were used for second/third person (I haven't used them much), but :) :( :D and friends aren't any less first person expressions than most emoji are.

Still, they have the same purpose.

Emoji were easy to implement in Japanese because they already had an input system, and all the UI to turn phonetic into single characters: はなー＞花. From there it's trivial to implement はなー＞ as well.

They become easier to implement in European languages as we got predictions, and touch screens, but until then implementing emoji would have been much more complex.

The point is, although emoji as known now come with rich selection of emoticons, same didn't apply to earlier Japanese emoji sets.

"Emoji present on the Sharp PI-4000 (1994)" from the article shows 20+ animals(12 from Chinese calendar), 9 relatives(grandpa, baby, so on), 3 types of alcohol(beer, sake, cocktail), and two smileys, one happy and one angry, out of 160 symbols. That's quite unlike typical non-Japanese emoticon sets before iOS emoji.

Granted, the Sharp pocket computer emoji wouldn't have been designed for chat, so there would have been less need for emoticons - but if you look at the list of emoji implemented in phones from NTT doCoMo and J-PHONE had back then linked in the article, there are just 5 each, neither even having a single circular smiley.

Ideograms are "too far gone" to be recognisable to Western readers now - too evolved away from their roots, when different writing instruments were used. So FWIW I would expect that your hypothetical future emoji conlang will not resemble them. Maybe it will look like an AI has redesigned airport symbology ?

At which point it would just be NIH to not just use Chinese. As I understand it, the Americas had vastly more linguistic diversity prior to European contact than the rest of the world combined. I don't know about further south but in at least much of North America sign language was used as a common language. I'd guess if you want to create what could be a universal language you would want to try to align written, spoken, tactile, and signed forms as much as possible, which would suggest directly aligning the signed and written forms as much as possible since both are (at least mostly) visual. And if possible keep the tactile version as close as possible as well. The spoken aspect seems like the hardest and maybe better to not bother with that at all.

Also, IMO emojis are too small. I've been wanting a 4x size for emoji (double width and height). With more compact writing systems you can make everything bigger.

> The spoken aspect seems like the hardest and maybe better to not bother with that at all.

You'd probably find that this is precisely where linguistic evolution is fastest (kids, teens, etc.) and it would quickly get out of step with other modes.

Good point, for best long term large distance mutual understanding it is probably best to avoid anyone using it too much and particularly kids.

I remembered after a bit that some people teach their infants a simplified sign language to introduce them to language faster, so to the extent that spoken language evolves faster I'm guessing it is just because it is most widely used.

>While their emergence in a country with a well-established ideographic writing system—Japan, kanji—may not be surprising, their widespread adoption in places that had basically used only alphabets is, at least to me.

I think that western world held a very arrogant view that alphabets are somehow inherently better than ideograms. Even when we started using letters to create simple drawings that would be put inside text, most people still completely denied the possibly of using ideograms. "It's just a small fad on this small little thing called 'computer', nobody actually does this". When you stop thinking this way then it becomes obvious that, if the Japanese decided to keep ideograms, even though they already have not one but two ways of writing phonetically, then there must be some advantage of using ideograms, they don't keep kanji around just for shits and giggles.

>I wonder to what extent emoji use might evolve so that people without a common spoken language can use them to communicate with each other

I can't see this happening. The way we construct sentences makes us think of letters first, and then tune the meaning using emojis. In order for such communication to occur, we'd need to invert this process: communicate with emojis first, and then use letters on top of that. Our language is simply not compatible with that way of thinking. It's easier for everyone to just learn English.

I would be worried about such an environment where emojis were a serious communication mechanism. Both from a risk of misinterpretation and the fact that language could be changed by font designers.

At present date there is no way to say "gun" in emoji, and even worse so the phrase "Bob brought a to work" would mean two different things at different time points - in 2013 Bob brought a gun to work, and in 2023 Bob brought a water gun to work. Drastically different meanings, that are changed not because the author changed the text - but font designers changed how "U+1F52B" is rendered.

https://www.reddit.com/r/coolguides/comments/k1xxio/evolutio... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pistol_emoji

It’s an interesting thought. China, at least in the late 20th C, offered many western travellers a glimpse into this idea whereby a local would realise they don’t speak their language and then attempt to make the characters to the westerner.

With that said, alphabetic writing is an indirection whereby the writing stands for sounds which stand for the objects. Logographic writing can copy grammars but the symbols can be read as the objects themselves.

I think it’s a simpler form of communication in some ways and if you were ever going to invent new characters when your language is “complete” you would probably do it in this manner.

> The characters ○金 and ○ビ were invented by the author Kazuhiro Watanabe in 1984 in his book Kinkonkan. These were quickly accepted into Japanese vocabulary, and they won a buzzword award at the time. And they are right there in the Sharp emoji, represented as characters enclosed in circles. They were in common use throughout Japan’s bubble-era, 1986-1991. The words eventually fell out of fashion and are now considered obsolete.

What do these mean? What is this book? What is the story here?

From: https://ja.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E5%9B%B2%E3%81%BF%E6%96%87%E5...

> 渡辺和博の『金魂巻』で、「丸金」（㊎、金持ち）と「丸ビ」（ビ⃝、貧乏）が使用され、これは流行語大賞を受賞した。

They mean rich and poor

Neither of these terms seem to exist on wiktionary.

These are individual characters that cannot be easily typed as they are enclosed in a circle and, as noted in the blog post, only included in some character sets for a limited time.

Most commonly they are typed as a circle followed by the character as in ○ビ and ○金 (used in my blog post) or enclosed in brackets to approximate a circle as in（金）and（ビ）or you can type unicode joining character to have the characters overlap each other as at https://ja.wikipedia.org/wiki/囲み文字#仮名文字

- https://ja.wikipedia.org/wiki/金

- https://ja.wikipedia.org/wiki/び

The characters that are circled are:

- https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/金#Japanese

- https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/ビ#Japanese

This is somewhat related to the paragraph about Wikipedia that I put in the blog post. 1984 was very pre-internet and this stuff only happened in Japan. So, there are many references to Maru-kin ○金 and Maru-bi ○ビ in the book, and on the internet, and they're mentioned on Japanese wikipedia. But whether or not there's enough quality citations from verifiable sources to please English Wiktionary or Wikipedia is a battle I simply don't have the energy to get into these days. I'd encourage you to ask any sufficiently old Japanese person and they will let you know all about this era, and then gather enough quality cites.

Unicode comes close for kin (metal/rich):

- Circled https://www.compart.com/en/unicode/U+328E

- Parenthesized https://www.compart.com/en/unicode/U+322E

...but not for bi (poor)

After the book, and the 84年の日本流行語 (Japanese Buzzwords Award 1984), these symbols also featured in a movie based on the book

- https://www.nikkatsu.com/movie/26211.html

Why would you update the English Wikipedia before the Japanese one ?

Why wouldn't I? I'm a native English speaker. But, I won't be updating any wikis as I don't enjoy it.

Because it's a Japanese-specific phenomenon (isn't it ?), and I would expect that different language Wikipedias copy from each other all the time, so if your goal was to (as I assumed it to) to put that information on (at least) the English Wikipedia, then having it first featured on the Japanese one would give it much more weight ?

Emoji is of Japanese origin but absolutely a worldwide phenomenon at this point!?! Of course this new info should be on all wikis, but I don't think it matters at all which one comes first. I don't edit Wikipedia, so I don't have any skin in the game.

Circled or parenthesized kin also means kinyoubi (friday), so it's not surprising that Unicode only includes maru-kin.

I think Matt must have updated the article since you posted :)

Between ginger bill (the creator of odin lang) and gingerbeardman, nordic redness is really having its moment in the sun! Tim Minchin, we need you back to narrate.

The funny thing is that I don't even have a ginger beard! It's a long story. — msephton aka gingerbeardman

This is great work. I remember seeing them on my keitai mid 90s but feeling that they were familiar. So filling in some gaps like this helps me not feel like I was crazy.

Happy to have helped put your mind at ease!

This doesn't discuss Internet forum software which allowed including "emojis" in text, via small predefined GIF images. Was this a later development? There were also instant messengers like ICQ and AIM, but they only came out in 1996/1997, and I don't know whether they had "emojis" from the start.

It's a good point, but my research was specific to Japanese emoji, given they invented the word and their symbols are the ones that were adopted.

I'd be interested to read a similar deep dive into forum/ICQ/AIM emoticon history. I only remember them from around year 2000 though I'd been an internet user since 1995.

Just checked and phpBB was released in year 2000.

In that timeframe, those were emoticons or sometimes just smileys. Emoji and emoticons have a different background, and have a totally different etymology, despite sharing the first three letters and sharing some subjecy matter.

I don't recall seeing much, if any, discussion of emoji until they rose to power towards the end of the 00s.

That's just a terminological difference though. Both solve the same problem by inserting tiny faces into text.

The difference is that with emoticons you could invent your own combinations and variations. Different people would use different variations of basically the same emoticon. You could come up with new ones hat hadn’t been used before. With emojis, you have a fixed set, and it is what it is.

Another difference is that emoticons blend in to the text visually. Your eyes aren’t draw to them like they are when you have a paragraph of text with colorful emoji sprinkled in-between, which can be much more jarring.

I know what you mean, but Emoji isn't a fixed set. Unicode is regularly revised and more characters and emoji are added, based on decisions made by the Unicode Consortium: https://blog.emojipedia.org/whats-new-in-unicode-15-1-and-em...

Depending on forum software and type of instant messenger, end users couldn't include their own emoticons.

We are talking about emoticons composed of and displayed as text characters, like :-) or =D or ^_^.

Are we?

The thread started out with:

> This doesn't discuss Internet forum software which allowed including "emojis" in text, via small predefined GIF images.

Which I claimed were not termed emoji at the time. Those were all called emoticons or smileys in that time frame. At least in my neck of the woods.

I think this is why the accepted timeline until this week began with the induction of emoji into Unicode, and their inclusion on the iPhone that introduced them to the West. There was a little bit of "oh, mobile phones and pagers" and nobody did any more digging until my blog post.

Those were parallel developments, but after Google standardized Unicode emoji for use with Gmail and Apple implemented emoji on iOS for Japanese market support, Apple continued to expand emoji set with bunch of smileys and human upper torsos, thereby consuming those emoticons into emojis.

I'm not well versed in those part of cultures, but IIUC, yellow smileys and semirealistic humans weren't focus of Japanese emoji implementations, whereas it is in Apple iOS emoji set.

If you find this topic interesting, David Imel put together a fantastic deep dive. He spent four months of research, went to Japan to interview the creator of emoji, and put together a very good video on the topic[0].

[0] https://youtu.be/g-pG79LOtMw?si=htnop9jpjmE3kQ75

It's a well produced video, I watched it and commented on it last week. At that point my blog post was half written but my research was already complete.

I applaud David for going to Japan, great to see such dedication. My issue with the video is that it simply retreads the accepted timeline rather than doing any critical research. He was in Japan and could have done some real digging, you know? What was he doing for four months? Just editing the video? I don't know. So, I think the content of the video is not a deep dive at all, as it doesn't uncover anything new. None of the stuff I uncovered for my blog post is covered. And we can now see more clearly than ever that Shigetaka Kurita is not the creator of emoji, but rather the creator of the most well-know set of emoji that was perhaps the first use of the sparkle emoji. That's a pretty big difference.

BTW my research was conducted in my free time over less than two weeks. It consisted of some googling, talking with Japanese friends, reading Japanese wikipedia (with browser translation, as can't read it natively) and that is all from the comfort of my own desk. So I would say anybody is capable of having done this.

Of course, I had the bonus of being clued in that earlier history existed thanks to the device I had in my hands. But my point is that we should always question sources and accepted history, because more often than not there's additional story to be told.

Too humble- I'm consistently impressed by your posts that show up on HN. The type of "do what you find interesting" we should all aspire to, cheers!

Many thanks! Appreciate it. If only to prove I'm not wasting my time (or, wasting it in the best way)

Some of those very really ones are starting to look like karuta card symbols

Honestly, I kinda feel like emojis don't technically start until they actually showed up with multiple colors & some sense of depth / 3d-like look.

When would that be?

Why, though? I don’t think 2D versus pseudo-3D is a significant difference. They are still used the same way, in the same contexts, and mean the same thing. Also, a lot of the common representations went back to flat, or never made it to 3D in the first place.

I concur. Consider TFA. The symbols are not converted to from ASCII smileys and are used like an extension of the charset. Conversely, I remember web chatrooms in the mid-00s, where a colon-paren would always be converted to the service's pallette's rendition of an emoticon, pretty color and 3D to beat.

Plus, there's a question of how people use them, but that distinction I think came later

Interesting to note that I can still type colon-paren today and have it converted, but usually to an emoji instead of the forum smiley gif. On Discord, GitHub, etc

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