[euske]

I'm curious of the eventual consequence of emoji development. Early Chinese characters were pretty much like pictograms. They have developed into a highly sophisticated abstract language / writing system, but its emoji-like aspects still remain today. The major shortcoming of today's emojis is that they are too hardware dependent and not hand-writable. It's interesting that the world is basically reinventing the same thing a few millenniums later.

[s3tz]

To me it seems like we haven't reinvented the same thing, but semi-adapted an existing process of communication to the technology available. It's almost like emoji's are the next step of pictograms, however they're mostly used to provide (extra) context to the existing form of commucation.

It's a bit like doing this:

"It was a very sunny day." <- regular sentence

"It was a very [sun emoji] day." <- same thing

"It was a very sunny day. [happy face emoji]" <- v3 pictos that (implicitly?) communicate extra context

"It was a very sunny day. [高兴]" <- same thing, but v1 pictos

[wongarsu]

In the western context they evolved from the attempt to convey emotion in text form. Writing systems are mostly meant to convey facts, while the emotion that we encode in intonation is completely lost. That lead to problems in pure text communication, so we invented emotes to convey the difference between

"It was a very sunny day :)"

"It was a very sunny day :\"

"It was a very sunny day ;)"

Some web forums started replacing them with images which lead to designers inventing more emojis, and due to Japanese carriers wanting the same for SMS those got incorporated in character encodings.

What seems strange to me is that most emoji that exist are completely useless for the purpose of conveying emotion, or encoding any useful information that can't be expressed in a word. It's like some designer had to fulfill a quota or someone wanted to just "have more emojis". Yet the most popular emojis are clearly still used to convey emotion [1].

1: https://emojipedia.org/stats/

[watwut]

> The major shortcoming of today's emojis is that they are too hardware dependent and not hand-writable.

That is major advantage if that would prevent adoption as replacement for alphabet.

[tdeck]

There's actually a chat system / social network called iConji that tries to create a new language based on emoji-like symbols. I'm not sure how many users (if any) it has, but as an experiment it's interesting.

http://www.iconji.com/

[teddyh]

See also: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blissymbols

[teddyh]

See also UPCOM in Captain Blood (the 1988 video game).

[pinephoneguy]

I wish instead of emojis they just included a “sixel” strip codepage with one character for every combination of 1x6 pixel strip (this only needs 64 code points.) You could draw your emojis and the editor would then compose these strips to send them. People do it with Braille now but this would make the images much smaller and get rid of the space between the pixels.