Emojis...
Statistically speaking, you know what they are.
They're these things...
and these things... and these things...
Do these even count as emojis? Surely they should show
EMOtions to count - and I don't know what emotions THESE are supposed to represent...
I mean the word emoji comes from the English words "emotion" and... "emotion" and... um
[typing]
Oh!
"Emoji" has nothing to do with the word "emotion".
Emojis were first developed in japan in the late 90s, with "emoji" being made of the words "e",
"picture" and "moji", "character". In short, an "emoji" is just a pictogram.
And what's that?
Well, a pictogram is a graphic symbol that
symbolizes something through its resemblance to that thing.
Like how this symbol represents the concept of fire through the fact that it looks like fire.
We add in this red border to signify "danger" or "risk",
and we get "a risk of fire": this is the hazard symbol for flammability.
A pictography is ultimately a form of writing.
So really we should be asking are THESE emojis.
As pictures these graphics represent various faces:
this is a frowning face;
this is a face with a modest smile rosy cheeks and soft closed eyes;
this is the face of a demon staring straight into your sinful soul;
this is a face vomiting...
But that's not what these represent as part of WRITING.
Within the written language of texting, they don't mean those faces - they mean abstract notions like
"sadness"
"happiness"
"psychopathy"
"disgust"
When we interpret them, we don't read these as the thing they're picturing...
rather as a concept associated with that thing: an emotion or cognitive state.
Now, most linguists would still call these pictograms because they still
carry their meaning through their resemblance to a physical thing.
However, they're not pictograms in the same way the book emoji is a pictogram.
The book emoji shows us a book to represent... a book.
The frowning face emoji shows us a face with a frown to represent... sadness.
There's an extra step of cognition there, which I find interesting.
And for the benefit of your education,
here are some more pictograms that fall under that broader definition of the word.
This here is a picture of a shield, which can be extrapolated to convey the concept of protection.
This little pictogram shows a dial turned up to the max - suggesting a VERY HIGH SPEED.
A pictogram with a coin dropping into a piggy bank?
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Anyway, where were we?
Yes, that extra step of cognition we need for interpreting emojis that are to do with emotion.
Well we know that for many people, including a lot of people with autism,
interpreting these emojis can be pretty difficult.
For autistic individuals, on average, it seems that emojis showing negative emotions
are especially hard to identify quote unquote "accurately"...
but that's not to say that no autistic people use emojis the same way other people do. Even for many
of those struggling with intuitively identifying what the emoji is "supposed" to represent,
learning to use these the way other people do is still completely possible.
These emojis can simply be learned the same way Chinese
characters or mathematical symbols are learned: this symbol here means
"confused" because that's how everyone else uses it and that's its definition.
But see now its resemblance to any real world thing is completely arbitrary and
has nothing to do with what's actually going on in some people's heads when they read it!
I would argue that these emojis are no longer
being read pictographically... but purely ideographically.
Now, an ideogram is a graphic symbol used to represent a concept.
For instance, this mathematical statement is conceptual. There are many, many ways of
reading this out loud and none is more correct than any other. "One plus two makes three",
"one add two is equal to three", "ett plus två är lika med tre"...
Thus these symbols aren't bound to a specific language or specific words
within a language - they don't refer to words or morphemes but purely to ideas.
So most if not all pictograms are ideograms,
but not all ideograms are pictograms... and when emojis are being read without
processing what they graphically resemble, aren't they closer to non-pictographic
ideograms? - symbols just representing ideas independently of what they look like?
Class...
discuss.
Regardless, of course these are emojis.
They're probably the first things that pop into your head when you even hear the word "emoji".
We could see these characters as serving two main functions.
Firstly, they act as emotional or social cues.
Back in the early days of internet communication
in the 80s, the "reduced cues" theory was popularised within the field of psychology.
Some psychologists argued that because so much human communication is done non-verbally,
the lack of cues from body language and facial expressions causes online communication
to become impersonal and detached - so emojis could be seen as an attempt
to reinsert these non-verbal cues into the written language, which is important because
we are communicating more and more over text because of the prevalence of online discourse.
And our second function of emojis is reducing ambiguity.
This is a function that goes right back to the origin of emoticons,
which can be seen as the precursors to emojis.
On the very first bboard where this guy proposed the usage of emoticons, he suggested
that these should be used so that people don't get confused about whether people are joking or not.
And emojis can be seen being used in a very similar way:
not adding any depth to the conversation, only clarifying for the listener or
listeners (*reader or readers) whether something is meant in jest or not.
This usage is very similar to tone indicators, and you could see this as a kind of punctuation.
Like how a question mark turns a statement into a question in writing, thus showing
the interrogative nature of that sentence, a well-placed emoji can turn an insult into a joke.
But what about when emojis increase ambiguity
Emojis on different platforms can render differently - sometimes
VASTLY differently. And miscommunication because of rendering differences is a very real problem.
I mean imagine if you sent
THIS emoji and the person you're talking to receives
THIS!
And even on the same platform, emojis can be interpreted as completely opposing emotions.
And punctuation which can change so dramatically
based on individual analysis and graphical rendering is unusual...
So is that what emojis are? Botched punctuation?
Well... maybe sometimes.
But i don't think classing them as the same type of character
as a full stop or hyphen is particularly helpful.
Like other ideograms - which aren't tied to particular words or morphemes,
remember - emojis can carry a lot of meaning with them.
Whole messages can consist of just emojis - just a set of ideas and concepts thrown
together into a written language unbound to any single spoken one.
A written language of vibes, if you will.
Hell, whole BOOKS have been written with nothing but emojis - and here
there's no doubt that these form a fully functional pictographic writing system.
So are emojis a different language? A pictography separate from normal orthographies?
Well... maybe sometimes.
But i don't think classing them as the same type of thing as Chinese
logograms or the Somali language is particularly helpful either.
We generally use emojis as a complement to whatever language we're communicating in.
Whole conversations in emojis are rare and... seen as gimmicks when they do occur.
So... what ARE emojis?
I...
don't have an answer to this question.
I mean, what is there to say?
A linguist might say "emojis are pictograms contained within writing".
A computer scientist might say they're pictures encoded as text characters.
But really what does that tell us apart from just...
emojis...
are... emojis?
I'll leave you with this thought.
In 2015, the Oxford Dictionaries named the "face with tears of joy" their "Word of the Year".
That's right...
"word".
And to be fair to them, there are similarities between emojis and words!
We've discussed before on this channel how the written language can be separate
from the spoken one, and how purely literary words can exist that don't work when spoken.
Is that so far from literary words that CAN'T be spoken?
Emojis have also exhibited an ability to change their meaning with time and usage,
just like words in spoken language!
I mean, just take this eggplant for instance...
added for the convenience of greengrocers and for the ability to write emoji shopping lists...
I imagine...
Well, nowadays this eggplant does not mean eggplant.
It doesn't mean eggplant.
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