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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
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).
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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!
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
Where is the iconji for malamanteau?