Google's New Emoji Aimed At Promoting Gender Equality Are Coming (arstechnica.com)

An anonymous reader writes: Based largely on a proposal from Unicode Consortium member Google, Unicode Consortium has announced plans to support new emoji aimed at promoting gender equality. There will be "11 new 'professional' emoji [that] will depict both men and women performing different jobs, and there will be both male and female versions of 33 existing emoji that currently depict either a man or a women but not both," writes Ars Technica. "The new professions include, in the Unicode Consortium's words: a farmer, welder, mechanic, health worker, scientist, coder, business worker, chef, student, teacher, and rockstar." What's unusual about the new emoji is that they're created using combinations of existing emoji to avoid waiting for Unicode version 10.0 to be finalized in June of 2017. By using a special "zero-width joiner" (ZWJ) character between two or more emoji, operating systems that support it know to put out a different composite emoji rather than a series of separate emoji. "The new emoji for professions start with either a man or woman emoji, then a ZWJ character, then another character related to the job," reports Ars. "Emoji that were previously one specific gender (the dancing woman or the man running) can be joined to a male or female symbol with a ZWJ character to create emoji of either gender. And all of these emoji can be combined with the existing skin tone modifiers to produce diverse versions of either gender." We may see these combined emoji before the end of the year as software companies begin to integrate them into their operating systems.

Comments

yay more emojis

[Anonymous Coward]

that should fix all the gender issues.

Re: yay more emojis

[OrangeTide]

The pistol emoji shows up as a realistic handgun, with the exception of Microsoft who chose to display a toy ray gun

Re: yay more emojis

[Yaztromo]

I honestly have yet to figure out what the fuck the point in most of these emojis is. In the past everybody just used a combination of existing ascii symbols to show the mood of your message, and I am still trying to figure out what the new emojis solve that that system didn't solve.

You need to understand a bit about where and why emoji's started showing up in the first place. And to do that, we go back to pre-millennium Japan.

Japanese is, to put it bluntly, an insanely crazy written language. Modern Japanese uses no less than four different scripts/alphabets, and in any given sentence different types of words may need to be in different alphabets!. They are:

• - Kanji: logographic elements taken from Chinese. These are symbols that stand for a word, phrase, or idea on their own. There are several thousand in modern use in Japan
• - Hiragana: a set of 46 symbols indicating syllables. These are typically used for native Japanese words that don't have a Kanji equivalent.
• - Katakana: a set of 48 symbols also indicating syllables. Indeed, many of these syllables are identical to those available in Hiragana, but with completely different symbols. These are used for loan-words, scientific terms, names of plants and animals, and for emphasis.
• - Romaji: as if all that isn't bad enough, some words (loanwords and trademarks) are written in the standard Latin script we use in English ([A-Za-z]).

And if all that wasn't bad enough, there is also hentaigana, which are obsolete kana sometimes used to give things like restaurants and such an old-timey feel (something akin to 'Ye Olde...' in English). And because the different scripts in Japanese are used for different types of words, you frequently have to switch between one and the others in a single sentence. In short, written Japanese is f'd up.

This is where Emoji came from. Imagine a late 1990's cell phone with the 12 standard buttons, and having to send text messages to someone in Japanese. How do you use those 12 buttons to select from thousands of Kanji symbols? How do you switch between Katakana and Hiragana and Romanji? I'll admit I'm not a Japanese speaker (I've studied the symbology, but not the language itself), but I'd think even typing "Hey, let's meet up with Akira at the McDonalds" would take a week on a standard flip-phone keypad. Thus emoji was invented to provide visual shortcuts for writing things that would otherwise be a major PITA to type in Japanese.

So basically, because written Japanese is so incredibly f'd up with four simultaneous scripts in modern usage...the Japanese decided to get around it by adding another script system.

Early iOS releases implemented Emoji to satisfy the Japanese market, but in can you don't recall that far back, it was originally only available if you set your system language to Japanese. In those early days, someone figured out how to write an app to enable the emoji keyboard in other languages, and eventually due to demand (which I'm assuming was mostly 12 to 14 year-olds) Apple eventually opened it up to everyone. At which point, hundreds of millions of people with sane written languages that use compact alphabets decided they were cute, and that they had to use them as much as possible.

Like yourself, I'm a bit of a curmudgeon about the whole Emoji thing. I can understand why the Japanese needed to invent it, as their writing system is horrendous. I don't tend to directly use it myself, preferring to use old-style emoticons in personal correspondence; however, at this point most e-mail and chat systems will "upgrade" typed emoticons to emoji.

So there you go. A brief history of emoji.

Yaz

Re: yay more emojis

[coaxial]

This is where Emoji came from. Imagine a late 1990's cell phone with the 12 standard buttons, and having to send text messages to someone in Japanese. How do you use those 12 buttons to select from thousands of Kanji symbols?

T9.

Don't try and be an amateur linguistic historian, when people are alive today that sent SMS messages in the mid 1990s. Also, the history of emoji is in Wikipedia.

So what's the real story? Someone at NTT Docomo wanted prettier emoticons. Then once they had that, they decided to shove all their icons into this new dingbat font for ease of use. Softbank wanted feature parity, so they did the same. Then later the two fonts were shoved together, and so we have the unholy union that gives us ðY"' and ðY--, âoe'ï and ðY-, and my favorite ðY" and ðY"Z.

Re: yay more emojis

[Pfhorrest]

No.

Your summary of Japanese writing systems is pretty accurate, but that has little to nothing to do with where emoji come from.

Japanese did not have a single unified text encoding scheme used by all technology manufacturers, but because all of them needed the ability to essentially select from a bunch of different pictures in order to write kanji, many of the different proprietary text encodings included code points (and font support) for actual pictures of things too -- emoji.

Then Unicode came along and said we're going to make One Text Encoding To Unite Them All, a single text encoding into which all text could be converted without any loss of data, which meant that they had to be able to encode all of those emoji code points in all of those different proprietary Japanese text encodings.

As you say, Apple included font and input support for this in iOS, mainly intending to service the Japanese market, but then it was discovered by Westerners as well, and exploded in popularity -- yeah, probably due to teenagers who found them cutesy.

All of this gender and race stuff nowadays is not because anyone is pushing some kind of social justice agenda, but because the original emoji were extremely haphazard -- it's just whatever these handful of Japanese companies felt like including in their proprietary text encodings, that then also had to be supported in Unicode. Because of that haphazard origin, things are weirdly non-diverse, for no good reason; it just so happened to end up that way. And then the people overusing these things that were really just legacy support for old proprietary foreign features started asking why is there only e.g. a dancing woman, not a dancing man? "I'm a man and I want to indicate dancing, why is there only a woman dancing, and no man?"

The answer is "haphazard history", but also "sure, why not", and so we get new combining characters to indicate the sex and gender of your dancer or runner or construction worker or whatever, because if we're going to have this crap in there, which we have to to fulfill the basic purpose of Unicode to support all text encodings from everywhere ever, then we may as well be fair and neutral about it all while we're at it.

Re: yay more emojis

[AmiMoJo]

It's not as bad as you make out. Consider that English has 26 letters, but actually there are another 26 that have the same meaning but are uppercase versions of the lowercase 26. The logographic ones (kanji) are more complex but each is made up of a few simpler ones, so once you know the basics it's not too bad.

Typing on phone pads isn't bad either. In fact, many Japanese are so good at it that they prefer it over a QWERTY keyboard. Both Google's and Apple's mobile Japanese keyboards support phone keypad input modes.

Basically each key is assigned to a vowel sound, and you hold it down to select the consonant. On top of that you have something like the western predictive text system where each key can be one of three or four characters, and the phone suggests the most likely combinations. In Japanese though, there are more suggests on screen and not just words, but whole sentences. The prediction is much more advanced and Japanese people can type incredibly fast on it.

I can in fact speak Japanese and I can assure you that the writing system is not horrendous, it's actually quite efficient. Kanji can be some work to learn, but on the other hand there is no spelling or odd grammar rules or character combinations making different sounds you need to master. The language is also highly regular, there being only two irregular verbs.

I think it's actually a common misconception that having difficult writing system caused the adoption of emoji. They were really just invented by phone companies as a way to personalize and decorate messages. Anyone familiar with Japanese culture will know that they like to decorate things with little symbols and pictures.

Re: yay more emojis

[Merk42]

...because if we're going to have this crap in there, which we have to to fulfill the basic purpose of Unicode to support all text encodings from everywhere ever, then we may as well be fair and neutral about it all while we're at it.

So then shouldn't the push be to make emoji genderless/raceless/etc that way there can be one 'dancer' instead of every single combination of sex/race/width/wealth?

Great!

[friesofdoom]

I'm glad to see that google is taking impressive steps at forwarding humanity!

A better way to promote gender equality

[DrXym]

Stop releasing fucking emojis for either sex. And Unicode Consortium, stop thinking it's your job to assign characters to arbitrary and ephemeral emojis because it isn't.

Re:A better way to promote gender equality

[Pfhorrest]

Unicode has to support some emoji, because Unicode has to be able to interconvert with text from old proprietary Japanese text encodings that included emoji, because that's what Unicode does, it interconverts with every text encoding from everywhere ever. That's the whole point of it.

And if it's going to be encoding some emoji, it may as well support and fair and neutral selection of races and sexes etc, rather than just whatever random haphazard cross-section of them happened to be included on the whims of the designers of those old proprietary Japanese text encodings.

Re:A better way to promote gender equality

[DrXym]

Okay, so what's the unicode character for a tank? Oh meant a Pershing tank. No I meant a Pershing tank facing left. No I meant a Pershing tank facing left in its Belgian configuration. No I meant a Pershing tank facing left in its Belgian configuration with a guy's head poking out the driver's hatch.

There are an infinite and arbitrary number of "emojis" that someone could think of. Unicode is not the place to put them.

Fucking Search Company

[Anonymous Coward]

Google is a fucking search company.

Emoji's are emoticons and existed in complete form in icq 20 years ago.

And I'm all for gender equality, but this shit is seriously turning to some Jim Jones level shit and people need to get some fucking perspective. Go volunteer at a homeless shelter, christ.

Re:What's that smell?

[Anonymous Coward]

That's SJWs pissing themselves with glee. They aren't very bright, they think this means something.

Re:But gender is a social construct

[Hylandr]

Thousands of years from now, when archaeologists are digging up our remains and examining the bone-structure, they are going to identify the remains as male or female by the subtle differences unique to each and identify the person as 'male' or 'female' based on their physiology.

Gender is not a social construct. Mental illness on the other hand is.

http://anthropology.si.edu/wri...

http://forensicoutreach.com/li...

Re:But gender is a social construct

[Anonymous Coward]

That is great satire. The retarded perpetually offended class will always find something to be offended about. Love the stupid I sound smart language that those idiots always use "patriarchal normative modus ponens"

So long as "mother" is still a woman...

[mi]

Oh, wait, "Mother" has already been replaced with "Parent 1"... Is there an emoji for that — and is it different from the symbol for "Parent 2"?

Here is the symbol for "family" — and, for one, am triggered by their definition:

A family unit, which is commonly represented as a father, mother, and one or two children.

Re:But where are the Trans emoji?

[Anonymous Coward]

As a trans reader, I feel obligated to say that not all of us are SJWs. A lot of us go about our lives not telling anyone in person about it, except for the people we are dating. Please try not to be influenced by celebrities that are only famous for being related to famous people while being trans. Not long ago, transsexuality was mainly covered as a tabloid Jerry Springer topic, like little people, so they and the media are playing it up for all it's worth.

Transsexuals make up less than 0.3% of the population and get so much more media attention than more deserving causes with that proportion or more: Down syndrome. Hemochromatosis. IBD, which includes ulcerative colitis and Crohn's disease. Parkinson's disease. Type I diabetes.

Before I graduated, at my university's Student Union Building there was a family bathroom I usually used first, not because of anything to do with being trans, but because it's usually used less often so it's cleaner, and I like my privacy. Before the NC bathroom headlines, they put a sign to the left of it explicitly saying that anyone could use it, regardless of gender identity. It's more likely the Gay-Straight Alliance lobbied for that, but sometimes I think that bureaucrats are going out of their way to antagonize social conservatives so they can tick off some boxes, and it just counterproductively raised awareness of transsexuals --- as a target for social conservative politicians on the right.

I hope that these words help get across that it's not transsexuals' fault that the media has disproportionate coverage, and a lot of transsexuals would prefer it if there were /less/ awareness and inclusion (when it negatively affects other people, like M2Fs in the Olympics), but you can't exactly raise an awareness campaign about that. I don't usually reply to people, so...please let me know if it did.

Too bad Apple shutdown Ammosexual

[pecosdave]

Sure bicycles are an okay hobby and have an emoji, sure taking a dump has a turd emoji dedicated to it, but going to the range is a hobby that gets Tim Cook's panties in a twist.

Microsoft is just as bad, but everyone considers them evil anyways.

Re:images.

[Pfhorrest]

Unicode has to support emoji, because the mission of Unicode is to interconvert with every text encoding from everywhere ever, and there are old proprietary Japanese text encodings that support emoji, so Unicode has to too.

And if Unicode has to support some emoji in the first place, and people are actually going to take that legacy support and run with it, then it may as well do it right while it's at it, instead of just whatever haphazard shit a handful of old Japanese coders threw in their proprietary standards for shits and giggles.