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.

Comments

Re:them ancient egyptian hieroglyphics

[suffe]

Actually, they worked in three different ways. Pictograms, sounds and determinants.

If you were in a "hurry", had a lack of space or artistic reasons, you could just draw the symbol for bird and be done with it.

You could also use them to describe sounds (like a modern alphabet). This would combine a few symbols into a word that could be sounded-out.

Lastly, you could use them to simply be more clear, to help _determine_ the meaning of a word. You'd spell out the word for bird and then draw a bird (and underline the bird to distinguish it from the rest).

Interesting sideline to all of this is that you can write with hieroglyphs from both left to right and right to left. Doesn't really matter which one you pick. If you want to read it, just keep an eye out for the birds again. The direction of their mouths indicate which way to read the text.