Emoji Dick

A couple of years ago I bought a book by Vyvyan Evans called 'The Language Myth' about how Chomsky had got it all wrong about Universal Grammar - which might well have been true, but I found the tone and style a little irritating. Then last week, Amazon sent me an email about another offering, this one about emoji (reference 1), which I vaguely knew to be little pictures that young people included in the text messages that they composed on their smart phones. The book seemed a bit strongly priced, but £2.50 or so for a kindle version did not seem too bad. And it turned out to be another rather chatty and sometimes irritating book, but there was a good dollop of tutorial material on languages generally, a good dollop of interesting trivia and I have had my money's worth - despite being reminded that the kindle format is much better suited to fiction - for example 'The Woman in White', on which more in due course, than non fiction with tables and pictures. See reference 6.

There was, for example, the twittered contribution from POTUS to the debate about the shape of the emoji or emojis which were to stand for the three wise monkeys.

More important, I learned that while huge numbers of emoji are included in texts written all over the world, maybe half of them are just smiley faces. Most peoples' repertoires are quite small.

And as the vocabulary gets bigger, it is prone to all the problems of vocabularies everywhere, despite the bright young hopes driving the project along. So the emoji for hands joined together in prayer means one thing to us western Christians and something quite different to those eastern pagans in Japan.

Nevertheless there are thousands of emoji out there and there are emoji nerds, one of whom has translated 'Moby Dick' into this picture language. See illustration above and the full parallel text at reference 2. A quick check with a bit of the parallel text reveals a mixture of genuine Melville and other stuff, so I am left quite unsure as to what has been done - and to what end. Such picture language is not going to be of much use to many of us, even on the improbable supposition that a reasonable proportion of the original content has been captured. Not something that I propose to check for myself, but I do now believe that I must have recycled my (Everyman) book version of 'Moby Dick' in favour of a free kindle version from Project Gutenburg. I also associate to the people who wanted a version of wikipedia in Klingon. See reference 5.

Endeavours of this sort aside, the argument seems to be that texts and tweets are pretty sterile, quite apt to result in unnecessary annoyance or misunderstanding, annoyance and misunderstanding which could be reduced by judicious use of emoji, to replace in part all those non-verbal cues present in real life conversations, but which have been stripped out of digital ones.

Perhaps of more interest to me was talk of Unicode, something of which I had heard and which I assumed to be something to do with standards for characters in computers, but about which I knew more or less nothing.

A standard with the important property that while it assigns a numeric code to a character, or in this case to an emoji, it assigns that to the concept of a character, specified in words, for example 'U+0041 LATIN CAPITAL LETTER A', where 'U+' is for Unicode and '0041' is the hexadecimal version of the 32 bit number which is the code for this character. But the standard is fairly agnostic about the appearance of the character, in old-speak, about the font and the size in points. All that is implementer defined and so in one famous example, one implementation of the emoji for a handgun was a revolver, while another was a water pistol. Images which carry quite different baggage.

An admirable and very well documented project (see reference 3 and 4) - led by the big technology companies such as Apple - but one which perhaps suffers a bit from mission creep. Do they really have any business getting into a native american language called 'Osage'? Are they not pushing into linguistic and anthropological areas into which they would do better not to push, not to say stray? Where does the standardisation of codes for characters stop?

PS: I also learned that my Microsoft telephone knows all about these things, with hundreds if not thousands of them available for use anywhere where I might otherwise type a regular character, an A or a B. But will I?

Reference 1: the Emoji Code: How Smiley Faces, Love Hearts and Thumbs Up are Changing the Way We Communicate – Dr Vyvyan Evans - 2017.

Reference 2: Emoji Dick - Fred Benenson and others - 2010. Open access.

Reference 3: http://unicode.org/.

Reference 4: the Unicode® Standard: Version 9.0: Core Specification - UNICODE consortium - 2016. Open access.

Reference 5: http://klingon.wikia.com/wiki/ghItlh%27a%27.

Reference 6: http://psmv3.blogspot.co.uk/2017/06/flou.html.