Am I really the weird one out for finding the whole emoji thing rather ho-hum and boring? From what i remember, humans moved away from hieroglyphics into expressing ideas with language, both written and spoken. It just seems to be pointless to want to go back in the other direction.
@lain If so, then emoji are actually worse than hieroglyphs.
it's a good question if we should adapt it for western languages, though.
@lain Now that you say it that way it makes more sense. This is one Japanese thing that arguably shouldn't have left the islands (and I'm speaking as an anime fan who is about to re-watch Nobunaga the Fool).
@skquinn @lain @enkiv2 I think it's a feature that you can't tell that :pray: means high five, hands clasped in prayer, or a polite greeting (i.e. wai)
also I have to tell you, English is actually in the exact same situation as Japanese, but it's much, much, worse: it relies on not one but *two* other foreign languages for its dense info work, Greek and Latin, but all the metadata is corrupted almost beyond recognition.
@enkiv2 @lain @skquinn if you want to see what English would look like as a strictly Anglo corpus, check out http://anglish.wikia.com/wiki/Main_leaf , it's pretty neat :D
ok nerd infodump over, sry :p
@amphetamine @skquinn @lain
I don't think the vagueness of emoji is a negative thing. It's just a *very* different tool than kanji, for a *very* different purpose (hence why it appears in contexts where kanji is already around).
We have all sorts of typographical conventions for vagueness and irony, and emoji is another one that's more compressed.
@amphetamine @enkiv2 @skquinn @lain @typhlosion What does that mean?
@kellerfuchs @amphetamine @enkiv2 @skquinn @lain google translate says "Lol"
@enkiv2 @skquinn @lain @typhlosion @kellerfuchs that's the character for smiling or laughing :)
@amphetamine @lain @enkiv2 I never got around to actually learning Japanese (it's one of two languages I'd like to try to learn, with Russian being the other) so I'll take your word for it there.
I was a volunteer gallery host for the Refugee exhibit that FotoFest brought here to Houston. In one of the videos the lady says the roots for the word "photography" are Latin when they are actually Greek. Drives me nuts thinking about it now.
@skquinn
Duolinguo currently has Japanese & Russian.
I didn't get far enough into the Russian to say anything about the course (other than that the early lessons are strangely oedipal because of letter distribution), but the Japanese course is pretty nice.
@enkiv2 I was considering springing for Rosetta Stone and taking the courses on a borrowed Windows laptop. I'm glad that I have another option.
@skquinn
I have used the Rosetta Stone Japanese software (albeit like 15 years ago) and I consider it far worse than Duolinguo. Like, I finished the course and learned less than I did from a 2-month after school course (which taught us no kanji); I've learned probably twice than from Duolinguo in a little over a month on casual mode.
@skquinn @lain
Emoji doesn't really fit well into the categorization of ideogram either; most of the information an emoji encodes would be non-verbal in a face to face conversation anyhow, and has no conventionally recognized meaning.
I don't use them much, but I've found them occasionally useful as a low-bandwidth alternative to posting a surreal semi-related image. Since they first appeared in the 90s, this makes sense.