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New iConji Language For the Symbol-Minded Texter
billdar writes "As texting evolves into its own language, a Northern Colorado Business Review article covers an ambitious project to develop a new symbol-based language called iConji for mobile texting and online chatting. 'iConji is a set of user-created 32x32-pixel symbols that represent words or ideas, not dissimilar from ancient Egyptian hieroglyphics or American Sign Language.' There is an instructional video for the iPhone app and it is also integrated into Facebook."
Behind this project is Kai Staats, formerly CEO of Terra Soft Solutions, the original developer of Yellow Dog Linux.
3000BC called... they want their idea back!
My first program:
Hell Segmentation fault
8=D
(I'm sorry slashdot)
don't necessarily represent ideas or words, they actually represent sounds and are used like your alphabet is (see e.g. http://www.omniglot.com/writing/egyptian.htm). now, if those user-created symbols would function like pictograms, not dissimilar to the traditional chinesich characters we love and cherish, it'd be a totally different matter.</nitpick>
You don't need to have thousands of different glyphs available so that people can communicate. "Coffee at 4?" works fine for my uses (well, in a theoretical world where I drink coffee).
8===D
Personally I've moved away from SMS messaging. With my current mobile service, sending email from my phone is much more cost effective. I get 150 megabytes of free 3G Internet access per month. Even though traffic is counted in both directions, that's still a lot of free email per month. With email I can send messages that are both longer and more expressive than SMS messages can reasonably be, and I've configured my phone to notify me of new email just as it notifies me of a new SMS. So in this context I don't see the value (for me) of an abbreviated language like iConji.
the product itself is not open source; the code is proprietary. Symbols representing commercial products are verboten without a license, allowing iConji to remain free for users by generating revenue for commercial symbols. Companies would pay a nominal fee every time their symbol is used, and in return, would be able to know where and when people were discussing the product.
Okay so McDonalds will pay to have a unique symbol in the language and in return they get data on when and how people use it. So if I copy that symbol and write a free implementation I am presumably violating copyright.
http://michaelsmith.id.au
http://www.zlango.com/
check out the music video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ascDjKXgph4&fmt=22
If only it came out 10 years ago, because its just too damn stupid to catch on after the likes of twitter
To me, it looks a lot closer to Blissymbols (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blissymbol), but less well-developed.
She announces gleefully after spending nearly 2 minutes flicking through tabs and scrolling through mountains of icons to enter a message that would take most people a few seconds to type normally.
Dumbest idea I've seen in a long time.
Is there an Esperanto App? Some ideas' time will never come.
The cost of that cleanup, of course, will be borne by taxpayers, not industry.
The problem with Esperanto is that it is European in focus, while iConji may appeal more to people in Asia.
http://michaelsmith.id.au
Captain Blood called, and he wants his UPCOM back. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Captain_Blood_(video_game) This is an utterly terrible idea, however, as you can type way, way faster on, say, an iPhone than you could ever select symbols from a list. I mean, a bunch of custom smilies is what this is, and a bunch of them are commercial. This is highly likely not to take off. (Also, where’s the Android app?)
It could maybe become useful to some degree. If you can make people think of it as a game, a challenge, maybe it will develop to the point that it will be useful. People love the artificially constrained communication of Twitter, so why not?
Yet, I would advise the initiators to read the sad story of Blissymbolics. I wanted to link to wikipedia, but they don't tell it (in fact they tell an extremely sanitized story!) It's recounted in other places, such as Arika Orkent's book "In the land of invented languages".
In brief, Bliss wanted to create an internationally intuitive symbol language, suitable for full communication. That didn't work, but by chance, a centre working with CP children came across it. These are children who have normal intelligence, but extremely few ways of expressing themselves. They were also too young to have learned to read, so they couldn't slowly spell out what they want a la Hawkins. Instead they used Bliss' symbols as a sort of rebus: One kid who wanted to go as a vampire on halloween pointed to the signs for "dark", "man", "blood", "mouth" etc.
Bliss was at first overjoyed. Then he was furious, because he found out the teachers (and the kids) used it "wrong", not according to the rules he'd set up. He threatened to sue. Eventually they were forced to settle, for a large sum. So in essence he stole money from handicapped children, but had to give up his dream of an international symbol language.
xkcd is not in the sudoers file. This incident will be reported.
The name seems to be a portmanteau of "icon" and "kanji," or perhaps just "icon" and "ji," which is Japanese for "character." That's the first thing that came to mind when I read the name... small, discrete symbols that represent a concept.
http://www.tenjou.net/
the iPhone app and it is also integrated into Facebook
Why does this "languages" presence on the iPhone and Facebook suddenly legitimize it? I can't think of any better way to destroy intellectual discourse than by devolving it to some random terse symbology.
While big corporations like Apple and Facebook plan significant depopulation in concert with the international banks and the military industrial complex, the moron herds are concocting new ways to think less than they already do. Woohooooo! America!
I like the idea very much, having had similar ideas myself some years ago to bridge the gap of communicating with people whose languages I don't know. The problem is that the grammar of different languages can be different enough to make direct transcription using these symbols more difficult than simply using Google's translate or a dictionary (or even learning the basics of the language itself).
For example: The basic word order in English is Subject Verb Object. In Turkish, it is Subject Object Verb. So, if a Turk writes I Water Want, you would probably understand but would almost certainly run into difficulties as soon as the phrase becomes more complex. If the Turk makes the previous sentence a little more complex, (I want water with sugar), it becomes "I water sugar with want". Turkish uses a different system of asking questions, for instance, so "Do I want water with sugar" becomes "I water sugar with want(question form)".
This carries over into many languages (some languages have no direct word for "to be", other have two or more forms, such as Spanish).
That makes this symbolic language useful only for very, very simple sentences, and glancing through the icons, it's also pretty obvious that it was developed by English speakers. For anything more complex, you're going to have to use a translator or, you know, actually learn the language.
keeping your parents confused about what you're s^Htexting.
Camping on quad since 1996.
that the Chinese, who use a symbol-based writing system as proposed by iConji, prefer to input their symbols by using Latin letters, instead of having a long list of symbols pop up.
Esperanto is a terrible solution to international communication. The intent is good enough, but the strategy is arse backward. There's no readily availabe stream of living usage to learn it from and if you did put the effort into speaking it by the book you'd have no one to talk to anyway! Shouldn't have called it hope, really, the irony is thick....
Seriously, what have people got against learning each others existing languages? Aren't there enough already without having to confuse the situation by inventing more languages, or this iconji, giving you that comfortable reassurance that you don't have to bother anyway because you can just communicate with flash cards and wavy arms! (I already know that, but THANKS ANYWAY ICONJI!)
If this means that all conversations are recorded and stored by iConji when you use their apps, it is without any doubt a deal breaker for me.
I can has 0//0.
The successful "techno-social" languages seem to emerge spontaneously in response to real needs. (Think of things like twitter's @ syntax, the web's emoticons, IRC's one letter words, even 1337-speak etc.) The very fact that this language is the fruit of an "ambitious project" to meet a need merely postulated suggests that it's destined for a life in obscurity. Nobody will bother to learn it.
Okay so McDonalds will pay to have a unique symbol in the language and in return they get data on when and how people use it.
Wait. A few questions:
- So if there is no symbol for a certain brand already licensed in the system, how do you, as a user, discuss it?
- What if I am a company that iConji disagrees with for some tedious moral/administrative reason and refuses to licence me? Could be double-plus ungood.
- What if the 'nominal fee' for my suddenly wildly-popular product is too much for me to bear or becomes irritating? Can I remove the symbol from usage? Does iConji come after me with hired goons for the cash?
- What if some other company licenses *my* symbol and uses it to track their efforts to dethrone me? Can I petition to get the symbol transferred to me?
- What if some other company licenses some sort of disparaging symbol to describe my fine product. Can I petition to get the symbol removed? Can I hire uber-lawyers and grind iConji into dust if they disagree?
All these questions will be running through the minds of company lawyers everywhere as soon as they hear of this.
You are in a twisty maze of processor lines, all alike.
There is a lot of hype here.
Write an open application that let's you define the glyphs, send them, receive them.
Problem solved.
Really, why do you need some company in between?
And even if Esperanto became popular, which it won't, there would be a mad scramble to "save the traditional languages".
- So if there is no symbol for a certain brand already licensed in the system, how do you, as a user, discuss it?
you can always discuss the house of the venerable and inscrutable colonel.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
They have a lexicon of symbols which they use to convey meaning pictographically! They use it as a regular language!
iConji is western/European too. In Asia they already have one of these, and a billion people know how to use it.
There doesn't appear to be any sexting icons. How can they expect this to catch on? ch'uh
I hope that after I die the one word people use to describe me is "resurrected."
the article (and its summary here on slashdot) states:
symbols that represent words or ideas, not dissimilar from ancient Egyptian hieroglyphics
unfortunately hieroglyphics compose a phonetic alphabet, not dissimilar from the roman or the cyrillic ones, with only a few ideograms for very common names. The idea that hieroglyphics are a graphical alphabet was very popular before the 1820s, when this writing started to be deciphered; archaeologists went as far as providing colourful "translations" from the graphical aspect of the signs.
this post contain no useful information, no need to mod it down
is that simple
That's the video's last sentence, all the while I'm like "reeeaaally?". Using the video example, It's a lot faster for me to simply text "cafe @ 4?" (intentionally using "cafe" instead of "coffee" for texting brevity". People already use their own (usually) mutually intelligible l33tspeak when texting (sometimes with intelligent intention, and sometimes because they were never exposed to anything basic writing skills when graduating from HS.)
In Japan, typing and text users can type/text with latin characters with software automatically converting them to hiragana or Kanji. And I would assume it's the same in China, India or anywhere that uses either logograms, syllabaries or abugidas. People make up their own culture-specific conventions and shorthands with which to do texting and informal typing.
Unless I'm missing some revolutionary idea behind this, how does this improve the efficiency of texting when people already have their almost-universal, l33t-based shorthands? Also, this seems to miss these universal UI design rules:
I cringe at even the name of it: iConji - taking the name of a legitimate logogram system to baptize a solution looking for a problem (and a badly executed one to boot.)
Seriously, I'm really not one to fall for nerd bias here. I'm trying really hard to see this from the point of view of a typical texter, and I don't see this flying at all.
An Israeli startup that had the same idea years ago.
http://www.zlango.com/
Didn't really catch up
Instead of creating a new language, how about you just type out a fucking word?
Am I the only one here surprised that vectorized symbols are not encouraged, or required?
Sure, they can be retraced later, when someone needs the free-res version. But in 2010, isn't Vector-fonts kindof de-facto?
verily and forsooth!
rewriting history since 2109
Would you have a mobile phone with a keyboard that has 2000 buttons? No! Some better way must be found.
I propose a keyboard with so-called "letters" and you key in the combination of "letters" that corresponds to the symbol you want e.g. if you enter "C-A-T" then you choose the symbol for a cat while if you enter "C-A-P" you choose the symbol for a piece of headwear.
Try Lojban instead
What are they inventing this NOW for? It could have been useful back in 1992. But nowadays phones have full keyboards or touch screens, and the older methods (e.g. T9) die quickly.
But considering how they practically re-“invent” hieroglyphs, I will await their coming re-invention of another very old idea: The wheel!
Any sufficiently advanced intelligence is indistinguishable from stupidity.
1 billion people in Asia are perfectly capable of reading and writing "Chinese simplified".
Then there's several million people in Macao, Singapore, Taiwan that can read and write "Chinese traditional"
Another 130 million are perfectly capable of reading and writing Japanese symbols, which are "Chinese traditional" symbols plus one or two entire alphabets added.
People capable of writing Simplified or Traditional characters don't lose their sleep when trying to read text of the other character set, it's not totally different after all.
Most other Asian languages have grammar that looks slightly similar to Chinese and Japanese, with other symbols and alphabets of course.
Why build and invent a rotten wheelbarrow when there's a fully equipped 21st-century luxury pick up already waiting at the tarmac that can be had for free?
Most Asian phones have a full character set already, most Asian people are capable of understanding all of them, most Asian networks are capable of transmitting the messages.
Every PowerPoint slide written to defend the idea of reinventing Kanji/Hanzi type languages is a crime against mental sanity.
I think thats over simplifying the issue a bit though. Esperanto will never even have that much of a threat value to cause a reaction like that. I wouldn't rule out something similar to esperanto emerging on its own, but it would be far more natural and spontaneous. The large scale version of languages borrowing words from each other. Individual words being able to float above national borders and become part of a larger world, that sort of thing. It may cause the all around raising of heckles when it does happen, but that would only be a sign that it is useful enough to be considered a 'threat' to traditional ways. At the end of the day, a language is only as good as how useful it is. The only thing really threatened is textbooks, because they wont be able to keep up with the evolutionary process!
For the moment, we have to be proactive and speak other languages, so that people can use their own insight to work towards that end. To have something useful now, learning russian or arabic or anything really is better than learning obscure conlangs that exist only on dead trees and only have the support of their own groups; that just leads to more fragmentation!
...to a problem that doesn't exist. Esperanto anyone? They'd have more luck if they'd implemented Tolkien's Dwarven Runes.
Bad analogies are like waxing a monkey with a rainbow.
"Linux is a terrible solution for international computing. The intent is good enough, but the strategy is arse backward. There's no readily availabe stream of apps in use to learn it from and if you did put the effort into using it by the book you'd have no one to talk to anyway! Shouldn't have called it free, really, the irony is thick...."
Funny, eh? You know, Linux works for me. On a daily basis. For internet surfing, printing, banking, amusement, news.
Esperanto can, too. It's not harder than English by any measure. There's good music in Esperanto. The best short story I've ever read was in Esperanto (Kabuliwala). I've read things in Esperanto, one will never read in English, like a comic book about Hiroshima. I've seen how other people's hopes are the same as mine and how human themes can cross cultural barriers.
> Seriously, what have people got against learning each others existing languages?
You may soon learn about this, as Chinese gets more and more prevalent. May you live in interesting times.
Perhaps then we'll be more receptive to a possible Esperanto II, more Asia-centric and hopefully (for us, Westerners) written in Korean or, brace for impact, cyrillic...
This won't work at all. How will we be able to look down on these people for using short, concise symbols to represent long words, when that's proper use of the language? Let's keep normal texting around, so we can look down on people who use short abbreviations of words.
The most beautiful iconic language ever designed. Unfortunately, it didn't catch up. A quick intro. The official page (it's an authentic webpage from 1994, be indulgent with the formating!).
Context is interesting - it is a "big deal", really. Here is an example of context for Egyptian hieroglyphs:
The "northward" glyph was a lowered sail: the Nile flows north, so they would use current to travel (no sail).
The "southward" glyph was a raised, wind-filled sail since the prevailing winds blew south. South was literally "the direction one sails". Which is, by the way, very convenient when you need to go upstream without a motor.
These things were just obvious if your life and economy revolved around the Nile.
Without that context, it has no meaning.
Text-speak has gained huge popularity. :-) today.
Everybody understand LOL and
Why won't something like Iconoglyphs become very popular?
r.e. the hieroglyphs, this is just some trivia I picked up from a museum exhibit; interesting stuff - museums are cool :-)
More detail here: http://www.egyptianmyths.net/sail.htm
and just as useful
in a couple of years, google voice & google translate will do the heavy lifting anyway.
I'll see your hokum and raise you a boondoggle.
Apparently, my comment violated the "postercomment" compression filter. I'm going to try less whitespace and/or less repetition. who'sd have thought that my comment violated the "postercomment" compression filter? What the joe heck is a "postercomment" compression filter anyway?
; x x y
; x x x x y ; ;
Will this fit in 32 x 32?
res ipsem XXXXX
loqauatur xx xx
xyXXX;x
x x
x x
x x res ipsem
x x loquatur
x x
x x
XXXXXx<--->xXXXXX
x x x x x x
x x x x x x
x x x
x x x
x res ipsem
x loquatur ;
y ;
y
x x
x x
Apparently, my comment violated the "postercomment" compression filter. I'm going to try less whitespace and/or less repetition. who'd have thought that my comment violated the "postercomment" compression filter? What the joe heck is a "postercomment" compression filter anyway? I say again, "postercomment" compression filter - WTF does that mean?
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
- So if there is no symbol for a certain brand already licensed in the system, how do you, as a user, discuss it?
You use some transliteration. So for say a particular burger joint, you would use a symbol starting with M, then C, then D. The symbols chosen also attempting to portray some additional subtext. Like, say... "Meat Cheese Dog".
WARNING! This girl exceeds the MAXIMUM SAFE standards established by the FDA for BRATTINESS
What is the point of recreating this idea? Emoji have been around for a long time and they have native support on the iPhone. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emoji
Apples and oranges. Linux is immediately useful to anybody that wants a computer and doesn't need computer games or other specialist stuff. If people realised that, the special stuff would follow them. It is important because it is the easiest available antidote to Microsoft monoculture. It's fragmented, laissez faire, open ended and doesn't tell you that everything has to be done one way. Its about as similar to esperanto as a tree is to a duck. Which are two different types of things that aren't usually compared!
You may soon learn about this, as Chinese gets more and more prevalent. May you live in interesting times.
Why do you even dress this up with a forboding twist on it? You obviously have some veiled opinion. I personally would love to be able to speak and read Chinese, I just haven't found a good routine for teaching myself. If I wasn't a broke deadbeat, I would probably take lessons. Don't presume it would be some undesirable punishment for everyone!
It's just Latin with the grammar all took out.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
Now thats a good way to sell it.
The last person I'd want to converse with in Lojban would be the kind of person who would learn Lojban.
-- Groucho Marx
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
Oh HELL NO!!!
The English language has undergone a flattening process in America and this represents yet another step in that process. This is a bit too much like Newspeak for me, kiddos. The purpose of language is the communication of ideas, both simple AND complex. Anything that aims to further downgrade language gets two big stinking turds for dinner from me. We've already got kids who can't name their own world.
Teacher: What is a leaf?
Student: It's that thing on the end of the thing (waving hands madly).
Teacher: What is a leaf?
iConji: (picture of a tree and a piece of glass)
I feel like this is painfully apropos.
Japanese kids take measurably longer to learn to read & write even KANJI, which is a *simplified* version of the original Japanese or Chinese - the Wikipedia page on KANJI is fascinating. I speculate that because such bazillions-of-graphics-languages are more difficult to learn, this is more selection-pressure on the Japanese brain, than there is selection-pressure on kids in alphabet-based-language-countries because ours are easier.
The savant Daniel Tammet's book "Embracing the Wide Sky" contains fascinating a hologram of tidbits on how the visual and language centers are related to intelligence, Tammet has a different angle on things.
I am currently working on an App, which I intend to release in both ANSI and UNICODE versions. Why do most of us need to use twice as much computer memory, just because some people need 16 bits for THEIR character set, OURS is 0x100 times better !
> [Linux] Its about as similar to esperanto as a tree is to a duck. Which are two different types of things that aren't usually compared!
Ducks and trees are living things, have cells with DNA, they grow, reproduce and die. Maybe I should stop before trees quack...
> Why do you even dress this up with a forboding twist on it? You obviously have some veiled opinion.
I think we will have to learn Chinese. That's foreboding enough for me. Actually, learning / speaking English was not a pleasant experience, too, though many reading materials were superb. The convoluted grammar was a particular PITA.
> If I wasn't a broke deadbeat, I would probably take lessons.
Because you're broke, you should learn it. I did many things when I was depressed or in big trouble. Esperanto was one of them... it turned out to be surprisingly useful, but not to what originally intended. I'd do it again any day. Learning to dance OTOH was a very bad move... who'd say that?
> Don't presume it would be some undesirable punishment for everyone!
Oh, yeah? Let's see what you think when you go to cinema to see old Chinese sagas -- spoken in Chinese...
There's a valid reason the Western genre died... it was punishment!
This would make for some interesting simple encryption ciphers :-) LOL
Because this thing doesn't (yet). What do you suppose it would look like? Upside down tanker? Bent,leaking pipe? Drippy sea animal? How about any symbol with an arrow in it, shifting the blame? Really looking forward to hearing about the wacky miscommunications/misinterpretations that will no doubt arrise.
People have been bitching about the downfall of their language since humans invented it.
It wasn't but a few centuries ago that we didn't even have consistent punctuation nor did we have any real notion of paragraphs.
...you meant to say that Apple will put them on The Dock and make them translucent?
And then everybody will say that it is a large improvement, more user friendly and much faster to use...
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens
Is the app written in APL or Lisp?
because there is no pictogram for "boobs."
No, that's Latino sine flexione.
You see the iConji meanings in English but your friend sees them in Spanish ... or French, Italian, German, Hindi, Chinese, and Japanese.
(from the iconji website)
They're crude little symbols with a local lookup table - and about as much subtlty as a boot in the face, for ever.... Doubleplusungood!
You cannot make parts of a language itself commercial, which is why this is bullshit. Or let's be nice and call it a bastard marketing ploy. How do you know McDonalds did not fund this project? Wet dream of advertising agencies. Control how you think, etc. So you may get icons for fries andshampoo, and Wella, and McDonalds, before you get enough icons to complete the language.
The only way this will succeed is if it is hijacked.
One interesting point is that it does not attempt to make a worldwide unified language as far as representations go, i.e. an iconji's image can be changed. Perhaps this could make it fun but it also makes it useless as a real language unless you refuse to use it in any non-networked medium that can automatically substitute your local graphics.
Similarly the idea of tracking usage of a glyph in a human language is repellent to me. Perhaps the inventor has a different outlook on life.
There is a real need for a minimal universally accepted language and that is a language that could be used in web pages to tell search engines what they are about, not just microformats but a commonly understood logical syntax. I have yet to see whether this iconji language is sufficient, in other words could you write a computer program in it. Although it seems you could create your own icons. Personally I would rather keep the source code in English.
It might be nice for comments in code though which are not always in English. Maybe also for webpages about software packages. That way they could be automatically translated with 0% error rate into (very boring short sentences of) English or whatever your language is.
I would say inclusion of Swatch Time would be useful if you are using this to twitter globally.
One more note. Obviously Japan and China have their own glyph alphabets. Actually this resembles emoji (illustrated, animated glyphs for email between phones in Japan) except in that usage not every single character is an emoji, over half are kanji or kana. Since there are no pictographs in western languages I amwondering whether you will getemails (well no not on phones, but maybe insms or twitterin) that are half emoji and half disemvowled English.Which would defeat the use. Just how easy is it to use? Need to find some middle school girls to try it out..
Chinese is totally different from iconji, as its a hybrid of ideograms, pictograms, and sound characters. the characters used to be really clever representations of ideas that could be recognized, but now they are overly abstracted for the sake of brevity in writing time (brush vs stylus in the past). most humans will respond to iconji symbols fairly readily, but its not true that nonchinese could possibly "ramp up" to use Chinese ideograms. honestly, i cant help but think that Chinese writing is at risk of setting its culture back due to the "installed base" curse. I didnt see if Iconji can allow for regular latin text as well. if so, it could complement nicely with text messages. and, they are funnier than words for all the silly naughty things people waste their time on at the intertubewebs. if i write "beer, sex, death", its not very funny, but in iconji its hilarious to me.
The much more troubling aspect is the assertion that a *language* needs to generate revenue in order to exist.
One icon we all don't want to see... the goatse icon...
"Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
The idea of a universal symbol language which translates to other languages without syntax is not new, but nobody has done it any "better" than this. The basic symbol sets do indeed capture the most essential frameworks for a message, but there is no mandate for how to create words beyond the initial set, and if words continue to come in then the character set will grow too large for a non-dedicated user to comprehend it.
On a more worrying note: There are major accessibility issues which have been ignored, which I am concerned might leave some things mistranslated. The most obvious example is having symbols of identical shape, but differing colors, with different meanings. This is bad for color-blind users obviously. Additionally, I was having a hard time differentiating the details of some symbols, even though I'm on a full size computer screen, wearing my glasses, etc. On a cell phone I'm willing to bet that won't be easier.
iConji is a set of user-created 32x32-pixel symbols that represent words or ideas, not dissimilar from ancient Egyptian hieroglyphics
I'm going to assume that these guys did next to no actual research before making this statement. Egyptian hieroglyphs were mostly consonantal symbols with the occasional ideogram appended to words to clarify the ambiguity stemming from the lack of written vowels. There were a very few cases where an entire word was represented with a single symbol; in the overwhelming majority of cases, words were spelled out with multiple symbols just as they were in the truly alphabetic scripts that arose later.
Oh, and hieroglyphic is an adjective; the noun is hieroglyph. You can talk about hieroglyphic writing or about hieroglyphs, but talking about hieroglyphics shrieks the same degree of ignorance that one sees in people who think "orientate" and "administrate" are actual words.
Proud member of the Weirdo-American community.
The front of the M.C. was a mediatron, which meant anything that had pictures moving around on it, or sound coming out, or both. As Harv poked it with his fingers and spoke to it, little moving pictures danced around.
"What are those?" Nell said.
"Mediaglyphics" Harv said coolly. "Someday you'll learn how to read."
Nell could already read some of them.
If it weren't marketed as a "bright new idea" with an appropriate product, company and undoubtedly, patents, behind it, it could actually be useful if it was integrated into "normal" IM applications in approximately the same way the smileys are today. It would serve a purpose similar to "message macros" in IRC and others - a shorthand writing in situations where the messages are simple, with the default still being the "normal" way of typing messages. Using just the pictures is extremely constrained without elaborate support for creating new pictures and composing new pictures out of the old ones, but if one's workday is mainly centered over answering messages with "yes", "no", "coffee?" and "lunch?", it could be very convenient. :)
-- Sig down
As with many things, I would say that George Lucas was a visionary in Star Wars.
In Star Wars, notice how everyone SPEAKS their own language, but everybody understands pieces of everyone else's. I took 2 years of High School Spanish and I have trouble putting a sentence together. But I can usually follow a conversation between 2 Spanish speakers no problem, even though I only know about half the words. I can infer another quarter by context, making the conversation easy to understand.
So we shouldn't learn how to SPEAK other languages, we should learn how to HEAR them.
Peter predicted that you would "deliberately forget" creation 2000 years ago...
First off, I don't think this will catch on, because it requires users to learn something, and in order to be really popular it needs to be so simple that they pick it up almost intuitively. Having to learn a few hundred symbols sorted into only 8 categories is likely to be a problem with adoption.
That said, it brings some of the power of Chinese style writing to other languages.Its been a while since I studied Linguistics, but if I recall correctly:
* China has 5 basic language groups (Mandarin, Cantonese, Han, Wu and some other one I can't recall), and over 1 million different dialects, yet any newspaper or other written materials created anywhere in the country can be read by anyone else anywhere else, because the writing system being symbolic means the readers are free to pronounce the words in their own way. The meaning is attached to the symbols (usually in pairs I believe). Thats a very great invention for a writing system.
* The problem is that as a young student, you need to learn thousands of symbols to be able to write with the system. The learning curve is not trivial.
iConji would seemingly have the potential to let people who speak different languages manage to communicate at least at a basic level about simple subjects. I might be entering the symbols with the English language version turned on, but you interpret the message with Spanish turned on because thats your native language.
* One problem they face if it becomes popular is the need for expanded vocabulary of a specific nature. Using Basic English, you can get by with about 800 words apparently, but the moment you want to discuss anything technical you had better star learning the full language. Assuming this caught on, they would need a central repository for creating and disseminating new symbols for specialized words used in technical fields for instance. Then they need to develop some pretty specific icons. Whats a good symbol for "load bearing wall", or "object oriented development"? Now imagine your iPad iConji interface filling up with 100,000 or so technical terms that are required for all the different professions. Try to imagine keeping up with that as well.
* They were idiots to not involve someone formally trained in Linguistics I think. Without a solid basis in the way we use languages, this will end up being a house of cards if it gleans any fans. Language is not simple, even if it seems like it is because you speak one fluently. Trying to produce a system that is able to work effectively with different languages (some of which use radically different grammars etc) is going to be a real headache. Sure, English->German and vice versa might work, but how is Inuit->Khosa going to work down the road?
The problem is getting people to adopt this system. Either it catches on and becomes wildly popular or it goes the way of Blisssymbols and fades into non-existence. Like it or not English is becoming the defacto Lingua Franca (oh the irony), and replacing the rest of the world's languages over time.
We are losing hundreds of languages a year I recall reading. Each one is a unique way in which a human can experience and describe reality, a unique way of thinking (if you believe in Sapir-Whorf), and once its gone its more or less irreplaceable. What we are doing is slowly reducing ourselves to a handful of means of expression. I expect the winners to be Mandarin and English (in that order) 200 years from now, unless something radical happens to split us up into smaller communities again.
"The first time I got drunk, I got married. The second time I bought a chimpanzee, after that I stayed sober" Arian Seid
... the example message in the video is clearly asking for a cup of *tea* at four.
The glaring lack of proper nouns (specifically, people in my contacts or people I know, my individual pets, etc) makes this not so useful to me.
Bliss wasn't the first to attempt making an universal, ideographic writing system either.
xkcd is not in the sudoers file. This incident will be reported.
I can type in a mini-keyboard like the one I have in my Android phone faster than I can find the symbols in these 8 different spaces. Going back to ideograms is stupid. Ideograms are cool, but they are as inneficient to writing language as the roman algarisms were to compose a big number. Maybe to "coffee at four?" it can do, but to anything more elaborate it's trash.
So, no, thanks, I'll stick with my good old alphabet.
Actually, learning / speaking English was not a pleasant experience, too, though many reading materials were superb. The convoluted grammar was a particular PITA.
Well, I have to complement your success though, your English is probably better than most people's in my town.
Let me say this though, even if English wouldn't have been your first choice, you have ended up learning because of needing it - so why should us English speakers get away with not having to learn anything? We can sit and pretend its the de-facto international language, but really it's a last resort, and could have just as easily been French, Spanish, Portuguese with another roll of the dice. We have an astonishing ignorance of the amount of effort put into learning English worldwide. I've met people in every continent with a much better command of english than I have ever achieved myself in another language.
So if the idea of having to learn chinese is discomforting, then good, because we are much too comfortable! Daytime tv tells us to go and enjoy bali, greece and thailand, but I can't remember it once offering the suggestion that it might be good to learn a few words before you go, and everyone I have ever tried to convince stubbornly asserts that it is beyond their capability, well I speak a few words of half a dozen languages so that's bollocks!
This is probably why I the idea of spending time on invented languages irks me somewhat, because if someone is going to put the effort in to learning, it might be nice for the effort to end up being appreciated by some living, everyday people. But I should probably accept that people could have a rational reason to do so...
What people have against learning each others languages? First, there are far too many major languages for this idea to be anything but ridiculous. Second, all existing languages are complete messes and English is a good example of this. I'm not a big fan of Esperanto, but it's still a lot easier to learn compared to any other language. Instead of the two or three years needed to become fluent in English, you just need six month with Esperanto. And with a better language than Esperanto, that time could be halved.
Esperanto does have at least ten or tens of thousands of speakers: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Esperanto#Number_of_speakers , and even a couple thousand native speakers. And with the internet, there are many more opportunities to have such communication.
However, I agree there is nothing wrong with learning existing languages, except that, unfortunately, our world hasn't officially standardized on just one of the existing languages either, thus requiring people needing to learn multiple lingua francas if they want to get by in more places (thus Esperanto advocates put forward Esperanto as a way of breaking an impasse in deciding which existing language to choose). As it is now, pretty much the official languages of the U.N. function as lingua francas around the world (Spanish, French, Chinese, Arabic, English, and Russian), and it is a waste of our resources, and a barrier to access to each other's resources to have no single common medium of communication.
My strong opinion is that the issue should be put to a vote at the global level (maybe the Inter-Parliamentary Union which might more represent peoples of the world than the U.N. at this point) so that if English is as popular as people think it is (its not as widespread as people think it is, for sure), then the majority/plurality decision can give democratic backing to it being implemented earlier on and in more places, and if English will not get enough support, then the human race needs to get started on learning whatever will get support (e.g., Esperanto).
Esperanto is a great experiment and may help such a global decision weigh the desirability/feasibility of adopting such a constructed language, though no one could/can expect everyone in the world would/will drop everything to learn any constructed language when there weren't/aren't any institutional guarantees that it would/will be implemented universally in schools around the world.
If Esperanto became popular (e.g., through nationalist sentiment unwilling to see English take over) and because of the constructed nature of the language (if nationalist sentiment against English would not do the same), it motivated more people to preserve their so-called natural languages*, a scramble to save traditional languages might not be a bad thing given the fact that with the increasing consolidation of existing languages (but not a single one), traditional languages are being lost quite rapidly, thus losing access to some of their cultural knowledge as well.
While I do not feel it would be a great loss in the long run for linguistic diversity to be lost (is anybody but a few hobbyists really lamenting we don't speak Old English anymore?), whether for cultural or religious reasons, no doubt people will be motivated to preserve their languages, and that is fine; it is wholly unrealistic to propose a universal language at this time which is not an "auxiliary one", i.e., supplementing local and/or national languages, as opposed to intending to replace them, and that's what most Esperantists (or International English) proponents are advocating. The point is that everyone in the world will have at least one common language in which they can speak, having learned it since early childhood.
We talk about web standards being a good thing, but how much enormous impact do you think having a common form of communication would have as far as science, technology, medicine, and dare we say, opportunities for better cultural understanding/peace, elimination of some immigration/native friction, etc.? I find it rather stunning that more people have not taken up this movement, though there does seem to be a bit of work to get people to stop thinking it means eliminating native languages, that the only possibility of an international language would be Esperanto, that democratic choice could not play a role, etc..
* The second generation of Esperanto parents ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Native_Esperanto_speakers ) appear to adopt Esperanto nearly wholesale, unlike the typical need for creolization as needed by linguistically-impoverished pidgins, thus suggesting it is already a complete "natural" language)
As IALs go, Esperanto is pretty bad. Most of the world's population couldn't speak it.
http://web.archive.org/web/20030904080229/www.xibalba.demon.co.uk/jbr/ranto/index.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Esperanto#Criticism
Utilizing the synergization of benchmark e-solutions to pre-workaround action items!
So they seem to have an example here. Let's see what they're trying to say.
"Send mail approximately equal concentric circles spaceship invading Earth."
Yep...makes perfect sense.