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Will emoji become a new language?

bbc.com

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Re: Will emoji become a new language?

#25
post #20
post #4

The arguments the author makes around technological constraints precluding language development seem wrong in a few ways, but I'm not that familiar with the field, so the column may be short handing more sophisticated analysis. Specifically: 1. Most (all?) written languages are linear -- they are processed sequentially by the brain and then deeper meanings are extracted (particularly wrt metaphors and allegory, but a…

>What about non-alphabetic written languages? Some English words can already be writen without using the alphabet. For example, '2015'. I believe numerals in English are used exactly as emoji (or Chinese characters) in Japanese now: embedded inside the sentences, which are composed according to the grammar of language. >The input difficulties of emoji today seems temporary. It depends on language, in Japanese input m…

As an example of the latter, the default first suggestion in my Japanese IME for "ha-to" is "" rather than "ハート".

EDIT: The symbol appears to have been stripped, but it was the unicode heart.

Re: Will emoji become a new language?

#29
post #3

A bit of click-baiting here, however it is quite interesting how long before :) or ;) etc. become widely accepted eg. in newspapers (assuming that newspapers don't go extinct first).

Speaking of clickbait titles, I'm reminded of Betteridge's law of headlines [0]: "Any headline that ends in a question mark can be answered by the word no."

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge%27s_law_of_headline...

Re: Will emoji become a new language?

#30
post #20
post #4

The arguments the author makes around technological constraints precluding language development seem wrong in a few ways, but I'm not that familiar with the field, so the column may be short handing more sophisticated analysis. Specifically: 1. Most (all?) written languages are linear -- they are processed sequentially by the brain and then deeper meanings are extracted (particularly wrt metaphors and allegory, but a…

>What about non-alphabetic written languages? Some English words can already be writen without using the alphabet. For example, '2015'. I believe numerals in English are used exactly as emoji (or Chinese characters) in Japanese now: embedded inside the sentences, which are composed according to the grammar of language. >The input difficulties of emoji today seems temporary. It depends on language, in Japanese input m…

> It depends on language, in Japanese input methods a lot of emoji can be written exactly the same way you write rest words.

The SwiftKey keyboard on Android offers this feature. If you turn it on and type 'angry', for example, it offers both the word and the emoji as predictions.

It works pretty well for English, but I'm not sure how well it works for other languages SwiftKey supports.

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