Slashdot Mirror
Do We Need More Emojis?
mikejuk writes to note that the Unicode Consortium has accepted 38 new emoji characters as candidates for Unicode 9.0, including characters depicting bacon and a duck."Why could we possibly need a duck? Many of the new characters are the 'other half' of gender-matched pairs, so the Dancer emoji (which is usually rendered as Apple's salsa dancing woman) gets a Man Dancing emoji, who frankly looks like a cross between John Travolta in Saturday Night Fever and your dad at the wedding disco. ... Other additions include carrot, cucumber, and avocado, and bacon. ... The list of additions is rounded off with new animal emojis. Some are the 'missing' zodiac symbols (lion and crab). Others are as baffling as ever – is there *really* a demand for a mallard duck? Sorry: it's in fact a drake!
Tell that to the Chinese that after 8000 years still don't see a use for a phonetic alphabet. If the Japanese were able to modernize their language in 46 Hiragana glyph I don't see why we should tolerate that Chinese non-sense in unicode. These assholes keep adding new kanji every year just because some prick want to write his name in a unique way.
The difference between hieroglyphics and Chinese characters (Korean just uses a syllabary as far as I know) is that while hieroglyphics were actually alphabetic in nature, hanzi/kanji are ideograms. So hieroglyphics are actually closer to the alphabets in use today.
We're moving back to dumb terminals anyhow. What's another aspect of life making the slow march towards regression?
"So long and thanks for all the fish."
The Chinese, and to a lesser extent other Oriental and east Asian cultures, are what are driving the adoption of these new emoji.
No, just stupid ones. It takes a real idiot to think "this picture-writing system that we've got has been a stone around our neck limiting our ability to express complex thoughts for two thousand years... what we really need is another picture-writing system".
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Here's a video on the subject.
It's worth spending the time to watch it (heck, it's worth spending time to watch most of Tom Scott's videos - it's Sunday, you don't have anything better to do anyway), but the jist of it is that the goal of the Unicode system was to have a single representation which would be able to encode *all* existing electronic documents. Emoji were already existing as a special feature of documents (text messages) send over certain Japanese phone systems (this is why we call them emoji, rather than "smileys"). If you wanted to represent those messages in Unicode, you need to have code points for emoji. To omit them from Unicode means there are existing electronic documents which *cannot* be converted into Unicode, meaning you're still stuck with standard proliferation, the very thing which Unicode was intended to fix.
Now that rationale only goes as far as the existing emojis. It doesn't extend to the new emoji. The reason for those ... well ... that's because emoji escaped their Japanese origin, and the worldwide community is wondering why there are six different emoji for sushi and none for <insert other regional cuisine here>
We moved on from hieroglyphs since writing by hand was so tedious anyone bothering could be assumed to be serious in unclear cases. Since writing and sending messages has moved on to an everyday form of personal communication, it also requires a concise way to express tone and emotion a non-professional writer can manage.
Excuse me if the following sounds a bit exasperated, but you do realize that people actually communicated informal messages to each other written form BEFORE texting, right?
People wrote letters and postcards, and they've been doing this for centuries. People wrote office memos and short notes to loved ones, either left in a box for someone to pick up or perhaps carried by courier to the recipient. Once the telegraph was developed, people sent telegrams and paid by the length of the message, so they often managed to communicate extraordinary emotions in a few lines of text. (I have the telegrams sent between my grandmother and grandfather when my mother was born during WWII and my grandfather was overseas. You can easily get the emotions they were experiencing from the short texts; it's quite moving, actually.)
I don't think you realize the extent that people used memos and couriers in the days before telephones, or the extent that people wrote informal postcards to each other or short letters on a regular basis to keep relatives and friends abreast of ongoing events. Mail used to even be delivered multiple times per day in many places in the U.S.
While handwritten notes sometimes could include graphical symbols, most people didn't make a lot of use of them, because text is so efficient at conveying ideas.
And we already have symbols to express written emotion and tone -- they're called punctuation. Even a "non-professional writer can manage" to use them. The main ones are ! and ?, but you can also convey quite a variety of emotions through combinations: !! vs. !? vs. ?! vs. ??, or even things like (?) or (!), etc.
A little personal anecdote: a few years back, I happened upon some letters sent between my grandparents during WWII. Actually, both of my grandfathers served overseas during WWII, and I have letters from both of them. A few things to note:
(1) They didn't seem to need emojis to express a considerable range of thoughts, ideas, and emotions. (It's very moving to read some of their letters.)
(2) They possessed a better grasp of written grammar, usage, and style than most college undergraduates I've taught. They still made errors, but I assume the fluidity of their writing is due to lots of practice in casual written communication (as was incredibly common back then).
(3) They weren't professional writers. In fact, one had attended school to 6th grade and the other had attended only until 4th. (This was also fairly common in the U.S. before WWII.) Yet they somehow got enough out of "grammar school" back then to be able to communicate in writing on a level comparable to at least a high-school graduate today.
I've seen enough examples of letters written by other relatively lower-class soldiers in wars (in documentaries, etc.) to know that my grandfathers weren't outliers either.
And in practice that means some form of smileys, so we can as well optimize them.
"Smileys" are/were somewhat different. Most "smileys" were used in place of actual facial expressions: a grin, frown, wide-eyed look of surprise, wink, etc. There's no direct verbal equivalent to these facial expressions, but they could of course be simply represented as *wink* or [grin] or whatever too, utilizing only a couple more characters.
The set of easily recognizable facial expressions is relatively small. Even if we include common and nearly universal body language gestures like nodding, shaking the head, and "thumbs up," we might only need a dozen or so such representations to convey expression/gesture.
But as you say, emojis are no lo