Does this mean that emojis comprise an argot?
That may be true in origin, but I suspect that the similarity to “emotion” is a large part of why the word “emoji” caught on.
No. An argot is a language intended to be used and understood by a small subset of the population to preserve their exclusivity. Emojis are a writing system, not a language, just like our alphabet is a writing system, not a language.
I was thinking about sentence tags as analogous to emojis - glad to see I was on the right track.
There’s a sense in linguistics that the spoken language is the “real” thing, and that the written form is just a representation of the spoken language. And that’s been true for the vast majority of history. But I think it’s starting to change. It’s now possible, for instance, to have a word like “pwn”, whose spelling is absolutely definitely fixed, but whose pronunciation is subject to some debate. And I think it’s also possible to have a statement that it’s possible to express clearly and distinctly through emojis, or a combination of emojis and text, which cannot be so clearly and concisely expressed via spoken language.
And there are some communities that communicate within themselves primarily or entirely through text, including emojis, and some such communities that use particular emojis in particular ways in order to be exclusive and to distinguish non-members from members.
Xu, at least, uses conventional punctuation marks as punctuation; the pictograms themselves are not punctuation. This makes the text much more readable:
There’s a long list of words that came into existence only by the misreading or miscopying of another word, going back to ancient times. That’s no proof of anything except that written language can have an impact on spoken language, including written errors. That becomes more likely where literacy is widespread. A general tendency of the modern age is widespread literacy, having nothing to do with emojis.
Pictograms have been found useful for ages, like on signs. Particular glyphs have been employed by subgroups for special meanings long before computer graphics. It’s all nothing new under the sun.
My browser refused to allow access to anything on that page. It doesn’t trust that site.
Johanna,
That was just a screenshot from here:
What I don’t know is whether he translated text into emoji, or whether he genuinely tried to compose directly in emoji; there is some identifiable grammar either way.
Thanks; I don’t know why, but the second time I came here and looked, my browser allowed it. Weird scenes inside the web mine
I find it quite intelligible. Somebody has an alarm clock that plays Beethoven’s 5th symphony, and the clock has a snooze button. I gotta admire the cleverness that went into it. There are authors who produce literary stunts with constraints like: write a whole novel without using the letter e. Xu Bing took on the constraint of telling a story with pictograms. This method is also not new; the novelty is doing it on a computer with the wide range of electronic pictograms available.
There was a science fiction writer (Melissa Scott, IIRC) who imagined a future in which most people had not learned to read “realprint” (what we call printed text) but could read only what she might have called emoji, had emoji existed when she wrote it. At the time, it occurred to me that what she was imagining was a kind of pictographic writing, like Kanji, and that is much harder to learn than ordinary alphabetic writing, so I didn’t buy it.
Neal Stephenson had the same thing in The Diamond Age (IIRC). He may have written that more “literate” people knew [vastly] more glyphs (compared to those who only care about what buttons to press on the free food dispenser), so again something like kanji. However note that kanji represent an actual language (e.g. Classical Chinese), and also that only a minority of kanji are pictographic— most are phono-semantic compounds. Even the pictographic ones have been stylized in such a way that discerning what they picture may not be trivial.
Hanzi/kanji are logograms, not pictograms. Each one stands for a specific word.
The difference is that one and the same picture could be put into different words by different people; there could be a variety of wordings to describe the same situation. But the glyph representing a specific word can only be that word, not a synonym or periphrasis in other words.
I do encourage folks to check this out. Two linguists have actually studied this issue–and written articles on the subject. Here’s a more in-depth article by one of the linguists.
That’s right. They’re a very useful adaptation of writing for the internet medium. The same was true of emoticons 30 years ago. I remember back then it was the conscious intent of using emoticons, the reason why they developed, which was already widely understood 30 years ago.
And as to why we suddenly need emojis/emoticons for writing when we previously didn’t - chat and email (and internet discussion boards) proceed at the speed of in-person conversation, whereas pre-Internet writing generally did not.