Emoji Have Hit a Noun Ceiling—and Need to Learn Grammar
What do the next 4000 emoji look like?
Nearly 4,000 emoji are crammed into our phones, yet every year brings more requests for burritos, hedgehogs, and microscopes. Jennifer Daniel traces a 5,000-year pattern from Sumerian clay tokens to Egyptian determinatives: writing systems start by cataloging physical objects, then stretch those pictures into metaphor and grammar. Emoji are already doing this—💀 for laughter, 🍆 for innuendo—but the next 4,000 won't come from adding more nouns. Daniel proposes directional ligatures, tone diacritics, and semantic compounds instead.
A writing system collapses long before it can successfully itemize our physical reality.
- rmah
Personally, I think adding emojis to UNICODE was a mistake.
- AnonC
> Emoji aren’t a language you can speak with your voice, and yet they give us a voice. They are the facial twitches and raised eyebrows that flat text stripped out of speech.
I love, love, love emojis and use them quite often in chats. They add emotion, whimsy, tone, and more. I can’t imagine text chats without emojis. I know that each emoji may mean different things to different people and also different things in different contexts. That makes it more appealing and inclusive (for and of people).
The biggest issues I have with emojis are:
* Too many emojis that I don’t know exist (search isn’t useful when you don’t really know or can express clearly what you’re looking for…Emojipedia helps sometimes).
* Too few emojis or no emojis for what I really want to convey.
* No way to flip any emoji vertically or horizontally or both. C’mon Unicode Consortium, you can do this!
- gertrunde
Perhaps something that illustrates my feelings about emoji... I had to individually select two of the emoji in the article and do a search for them in order to work out what they were... (they turned out to be oyster and fireworks, and seven didn't render at all...
(Anther set of searches tells me that some of the ones that didn't render were 'anatomical heart', tamale, 'heart hands', 'face holding back tears' (another one I would have struggled to divine the meaning of)
- monomania
If anyone in the unicode consortium is reading this, we really, really need a chainsaw emoji.
- chrismorgan
One big problem with this interpretation: expressivity is severely limited with computer text compared with handwriting where you can do what you want, and Unicode is about encoding what already exists, not creating anything new. You could say things like emoji skin tones are an exception to that rule, but modifiers are very limited in Unicode due to how it’s all implemented, and can’t develop in the way described near the end.