Emojis are the latest fashion in communication, if you believe people who have never heard of ideograms.
Esperanto is an artificial Western style language, or international auxiliary language. To be fair to Esperanto, the added auxiliary makes it clear that it does not strive to replace a natural language.
Labeling Esperanto a failure is harsh or at least not nice to the upwards of 2 million or so speakers of the language.
Let's face it, Esperanto is not as universe-exploring as Klingon or as sexy as Dothraki, the latter catapulted into the public through the HBO show Games of Thrones. How popular Dothraki would have become without the Khaleesi?
Symbols we call emojis today fall under the umbrella category of ideograms, going back to the days when cave people discovered the joy of reading, still surviving today in languages like Chinese.
Pictograms (🚮) were "emojis for engineers", if you will, and they merged with the symbols called icons and their emotional cousins, the emoticons, popularized initially as "smilies" (☺), to become emojis. In terms of computer fonts, Symbol and Wingdings were the critical practical means to add many new "characters" to digital communication, and even the Unicode standard has emojis these days.
As systems of communication, Esperanto and emojis have different capabilities. Esperanto can be used in spoken communication, emojis live in the written world only.
Esperanto has a well developed grammar and can convey complex and abstract thinking. Emojis can be placed in a sequence, the most rudimentary form of "grammar", and you can use punctuation marks, but they are a bit short on intellectual complexity.
Emojis do not have a steep learning curve. Yet? Learning Esperanto requires substantial periods of time dedicated to the activity. Many emojis, on the other hand, are embedded in everyday life, and most of the learning really takes place in small, almost tiny units of time.
Emojis cover a wider range of cultures and are simpler than "natural" languages. Although,occasionally, you see examples of wildly complex pictograms, which the blogster likens to Chinese symbols in that they have become too dense to understand without meta information (also known as "explanation" or "context").
Chinese symbols represent some of the original "text emoji", in that they come from drawings, for instance of a mountain or a frog, and underwent a process of abstraction, turning the symbol for mountain into three vertical lines on a horizontal base line: 山
A fact that makes some "text and labels" emoji on getemoji.com, for example ㊙, a somewhat roundabout venture.
In any case, emojis are more fun.
The rest of the blogster's day?
🚿, ☕, ✒ 📨 🎅
[take a shower, have some coffee, and write a letter to Santa Claus]
[Update 10/16/2015] Just found German printer Langenscheidt's greater minds actually make a word-free dictionary. While we eye the company with a degree of skepticism, we do feel we should offer you a link.
No comments:
Post a Comment