> I’d be interested in a comparison between emoji & a character-based language like Chinese or a hieroglyphic language like ancient Egyptian…

I don’t know of any articles, but from what I know of the subject there is no comparison. Chinese and Egyptian writing systems both have the capability to represent any word or sentence in their respective languages. They do this using a combination of pictograms, ideograms and phonetic symbols. (Though the exact structure differs between writing systems: Chinese tends to combine these components into one character, while Egyptian tends to keep them more separate.) By contrast, emojis can only represent a very limited number of words, and are always pictograms or ideograms.

Of course, there’s nothing stopping you from turning emoji into a complete writing system, and inventing a language and grammar around it. But emojis as they are used today do not constitute a complete writing system.

Ever since emoji became popular worldwide, I’ve been wondering if they will become the basis for new international written languages—languages that convey complex meanings using productive grammar.

In written Chinese and Japanese, the order of ideographs—which is what emoji are—can change the meaning. In Japanese, for example, 足下 means “near one’s feet; nearby” while 下足 means “footwear”; 行先 means “destination” while 先行 means “preceding.” The readings vary depending on the combination as well; the four combinations above are pronounced ashimoto, gesoku, yukisaki, and senkō (as well as sakiyuki), respectively.

Some ideographs, like 有 “to possess,” function in multicharacter combinations as verbs, while others, like 人 “person,” function as nouns.

I'm wondering if, over time, similar grammars might emerge with emoji. For example, the combination [OK Hand] [Grinning Face with Sweat] might acquire a different meaning from [Grinning Face with Sweat] [OK Hand]. Certain emoji, like, say, [Person Walking], might come to function as verbs.

If such new written languages do emerge, they are likely to be specific to particular online communities. Looking through comments on Instagram for posts with the hashtags #crochet or #hanggliding, for example, I notice posts like [1] and [2], in which the comments are in several different languages. Perhaps partly to aid understanding across linguistic barriers, many comments have emoji appended to them, and some comments are emoji only. As near as I can tell, the order in which emoji are used in those comments doesn’t have any grammatical significance. But perhaps, somewhere on the Internet, emoji grammars are in the process of emerging.

[1] https://www.instagram.com/p/CRHvQF-DXVE/

[2] https://www.instagram.com/p/CQ8eXf6CKaA/

> In written Chinese and Japanese, the order of ideographs—which is what emoji are—can change the meaning. In Japanese, for example, 足下 means “near one’s feet; nearby” while 下足 means “footwear”; 行先 means “destination” while 先行 means “preceding.” The readings vary depending on the combination as well; the four combinations above are pronounced ashimoto, gesoku, yukisaki, and senkō (as well as sakiyuki), respectively.

It’s worth remembering here that Japanese is quite unusual amongst logographic writing systems in having so many readings for each character. My understanding is that many characters were loaned multiple times from different stages of Chinese, as well as being given separate Japanese readings; also there are many irregular spellings, which I believe are quite unusual in logographies. (In some ways it’s as bad as English spelling rules.) Thus, I doubt that any descendant of emojis would end up like this.

> Some ideographs, like 有 “to possess,” function in multicharacter combinations as verbs, while others, like 人 “person,” function as nouns.

I’m not quite sure what you mean here… could you give an example please?

> If such new written languages do emerge, they are likely to be specific to particular online communities. Looking through comments on Instagram for posts with the hashtags #crochet or #hanggliding, for example, I notice posts like [1] and [2], in which the comments are in several different languages. Perhaps partly to aid understanding across linguistic barriers, many comments have emoji appended to them, and some comments are emoji only.

These examples are interesting. They don’t remind me of logographies at all, but rather of something quite different, namely ideophones: ‘A vivid representation of an idea in sound’ (Doke 1935). Like ideophones, the emojis in these examples are sentence-peripheral, act grammatically and semantically as modifiers, and are highly phonologically/orthographically distinct from the rest of the text. If anything, I suspect emojis would most likely evolve into some kind of ideophone-like system. (I personally think Mark Rosenfelder’s uɣoso [https://www.zompist.com/mars/modern-hanying.html#Implants] are a particularly good attempt at projecting this into the future.)

> could you give an example please?

Here are three two-character combinations in Japanese in which the first kanji 有 functions as a verb and the second kanji as a noun:

有人 <to possess> + <person> “manned” (as in “a manned spacecraft”)

有力 <to possess> + <strength> “powerful; influential”

有線 <to possess> + <line; wire> “wired” (as in “wired Internet connection”)

Here are a couple of examples where the verb-like character 有 is preceded by an adverb-like character:

共有 <together> + <to possess> “joint ownership”

現有 <presently> + <to possess> “existing; current”

Many of these combinations, and the patterns by which they are formed, originated in Chinese, which is why many have a Verb + Object order. Chinese is a verb-medial, or SVO, language, while Japanese is SOV.

The grammar that influences the formation of these combinations (called jukugo in Japanese) is productive, in the sense that new combinations can be formed and used based on the same rules, but it is not as productive as the grammar of sentence formation. Most of the jukugo that one encounters in writing and, especially, in speech are fixed vocabulary items and are treated as words, not as phrases or sentences. Their etymology, however, is usually clear in writing and aids in their understanding; that is one advantage of ideographs, and it also makes it easier to create neologisms when writing. In speech, because many characters are pronounced the same, it is more difficult to use novel combinations and still be understood.

> If anything, I suspect emojis would most likely evolve into some kind of ideophone-like system.

That certainly seems possible, too. I suspect, though, that if they evolve into anything, it will be many different linguistic systems, for many different online communities.

> Japanese is quite unusual amongst logographic writing systems in having so many readings for each character. ... Thus, I doubt that any descendant of emojis would end up like this.

Unless emoji acquire readings from a variety of languages, which seems possible, as they are already being used online in multilingual contexts. Let’s wait and see!

I don't have good examples for you but yes, in text messages I've enjoyed trying to talk with friends in emojis-only mode. It's a great exercise for how much you can assume about people you're close to (read each others minds, finish each others sentences etc)

And yes, [Person Walking] means to go somewhere, like 去

That sounds like fun! It will be interesting to see if emoji-only modes also come into use as a lingua franca among people without a shared conventional language.

> By contrast, emojis can only represent a very limited number of words

But in combination, they can represent many more, surely, just like hieroglyphs or Chinese characters?

Sure, but in that case you’d need to have some sort of convention for what each combination represents, and at that point you’ve basically invented a whole new writing system based on emoji. As I said previously:

> Of course, there’s nothing stopping you from turning emoji into a complete writing system, and inventing a language and grammar around it. But emojis as they are used today do not constitute a complete writing system.

In Egyptian hieroglyphs, the equivalent of saying "smoke" would be using a smile, an open mouth and an ok sign to indicate the sounds "sm - oh - ok." Rather than, for instance, showing a picture of a cigarette.

IIRC it would actually have those phonetic components plus a picture of a cigarette or some other semantic determiner. I’m not sure if many Egyptian words were written purely phonetically, though I’m hardly an expert on this topic.

[EDIT: Just checked Loprieno’s Egyptian grammar, which says on the topic: ‘While some words of common use … are written only phonologically, i.e. only with a combination of consonantal signs … many items of the basic vocabulary of Egyptian are expressed by semagrams which indicate their own semantic meaning. They do this iconically (by reproducing the object itself), through rebus (by portraying an entity whose name displays a similar phonological structure), or symbolically (by depicting an item metaphorically or metonymically associated with the object)’.]

Yeah, it would be most likely have a determinative symbol showing a mouth, hand or person to indicate the action — less likely to have the action itself (a person smoking a cigarette or a cigarette itself).

Here is a nice Unicode dictionary https://mjn.host.cs.st-andrews.ac.uk/egyptian/unicode/tablem...

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