🧐 #AMA on #emojis for #WorldEmojiDay ❗ #linguistics
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@tschfflr If you were an emoji, what emoji would you be and why? 🧐
@tschfflr most of the user interfaces around emojis are so poor that people with poor eyesight have little or no chance to recognise more than a few common ones and no way to "zoom in" to see a larger representation.
What do you recommend as a resource for looking up emojis?
@tschfflr is there (still) a lot of use of "signage" emojis like 🏪 or even more abstract 🛅?
@tschfflr So many questions but I first need time to read your excellent posts.
@tschfflr I am often curious: which emojis are used the least often?
@tschfflr Can emojis be removed from Unicode? Or are they there forever once they are in?
There are now almost 4000 emojis supported in the international Unicode standard, as of last year, with a few to be added this year
You can look them all up here: https://emojipedia.org/ #emojis #linguistics #WorldEmojiDay
It did all start with 😄 and 😒 and the start of these emoticons is widely credited to a bulletin board message by Scott Fahlmann in 1982 (where he suggested them as markers of joking or seriousness) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emoticon #emojis #linguistics #WorldEmojiDay
@tschfflr I still miss the animated emoticons in GTalk aka Google Talk. Apart from yellowish bubble style and rectangle style emoticons, there were upright typeface style emoticons. You just typed e.g. 😈 and it tilted 90° to the left and its "horns" turned red.
https://googlesystem.blogspot.com/2007/05/google-talk-gadget-with-emoticons.html?m=1
These traditional emoticons created from standard punctuation characters, letters and numbers have been largely crowded out by colorful #emojis in the last 15 years. Emojis started being supported by Japanese mobile communication platforms (phones) in the 80s/90s, but became widespread world-wide only when they were introduced into the international Unicode standard in 2010 - and subsequently supported by all kinds of technology providers and software.
So the 2010s is when "it all got out of control" @Kuchenschwarte 😅 #linguistics #WorldEmojiDay
(Little aside: The Unicode list provides an international standard of symbol encodings which should be supported - including our Latin characters as well as characters and symbols for hundreds of other languages of the world. This ensures that if you write Hindi or Korean or Arabic or Finnish, another person will be able to decipher and potentially read your digital document. Since 2010, this list also includes emojis - so my "hugging-face" will show on your computer as your "hugging-face" 🤗 ) #linguistics #WorldEmojiDay #emojis
☝️ However, there is some evidence that #emojis or at least symbols similar to emoticons were used before the internet. Many people know "rebus" examples where words are replaced by little icons like in this children's book. And I've seen an example of a hand-written letter with emoji-like faces as annotations (but I can't find it right now on my computer 😬 ) #emojis #linguistics #WorldEmojiDay
Two other writing systems are often compared to #emojis: #Chinese characters and #hieroglyphs. @Kuchenschwarte
I'm not really an expert on either, but I did study Chinese in university and recently had a long conversation with an Egyptologist colleague (who gave me the 101 on hieroglyphs 😄 ). Egyptian hieroglyphic writing was an alphabet (ie, each character roughly corresponds to a sound like p, t, k). So while the hieroglyphs resemble objects, they were not read as such, at least not in the later stages. (Btw. Latin characters also developed from picture-like objects in many cases, but it's been a long time since these pictures were recognizable)
Thus, emojis do not resemble Egyptian hieroglyphs in my view - each emoji corresponds most closely to a word or concept, not a single letter https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Egyptian_hieroglyphs #emojis #linguistics #WorldEmojiDay
@Kuchenschwarte "Why are emojis standardly not animated?" - a complicated question. The Unicode standard lists a code point for each emoji (and other symbols, too), as well as, roughly, its meaning (really a short name). You can see the full list below. E.g., codepoint "U+1F601" corresponds to "beaming face with smiling eyes" or 😁 .
You can think of the look of that emoji on your individual platform as a kind of "font" - the platforms are free to implement the look of each emoji according to their house style. This is similar to the character "A" looking different in different newspapers, platforms, or styles. In most Western platforms emojis so far are not animated. But in many widely used Chinese platforms (WeChat and especially Weibo, for example), many emojis are animated. So I guess it's a question of style. #emojis #linguistics #WorldEmojiDay
