Will emoji become a new language? • Hacker News Board

Re: Will emoji become a new language?

#31

Post by V-2 » Tue, Oct 13, 2015, 4:02 PM UTC

johnchristopher wrote: post #19

teekert wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I want news in news papers, not the associated emotions of the journalist. Emotions should be kept far away from news, anything subjective should be. Maybe it would work for certain magazines? Still, adding a crying face to a sentence like "Susan lost her first 5 babies" seems horribly inappropriate, this can change of course.

> Emotions should be kept far away from news, (..) Yes. > (continued) anything subjective should be. No.

Subjective is fine, but good practice is keeping factual news and comments separate / distinguishable. Obviously comments are subjective by nature.

Re: Will emoji become a new language?

#32

Post by mizchief2 » Tue, Oct 13, 2015, 4:13 PM UTC

newspeak?

Re: Will emoji become a new language?

#33

Post by bdchauvette » Tue, Oct 13, 2015, 4:36 PM UTC

yanowitz wrote: 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…

> 2. Paper and pen (the surfer example) also have technological constraints. It's a "2D" surface, width of line, etc.

This is true, but it's kind of true in the same way that walking and flying both have movement constraints. Flying certainly has limitations, but just like pen & paper give you more flexibility in composition than entering a string of characters, flying offers much more freedom of movement than walking.

> 4. What about non-alphabetic written languages?

Most (all?) current non-alphabetic orthographies are non-pictographic. While many characters for common words may have started that way, the majority of characters in these systems are nowadays not obvious pictorial representations of their meaning.

It's possible that this will eventually be the case with emoji, too, but currently it's not.

Re: Will emoji become a new language?

#34

Post by acheron » Tue, Oct 13, 2015, 5:10 PM UTC

amyjess wrote: post #29

V-2 wrote: 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...

You are at least the third person in ~30 comments to bring this up, and everyone keeps linking to the Wikipedia article as if we haven't all heard of it a thousand times before.

It's a generic dismissal that adds nothing to the conversation. Either engage with the article and say why it's stupid, or just don't post at all and move on.

Re: Will emoji become a new language?

#35

Post by pc2g4d » Wed, Oct 14, 2015, 11:06 PM UTC

Emoji could be seen as introducing a common set of ideographs into the world's writing systems. They supplement existing languages, but seem unlikely to develop into their own language due to the conflicts in word order (SVO etc.) in the native languages of those using the emoji.

Nicaraguan sign language arose essentially in the absence of another language, i.e. deaf people couldn't speak Spanish. But the vast majority of emoji users already have a language and so there seems little impetus for them to develop a new one.