emoji is not a language (#384)

* emoji is not a language

Signed-off-by: Christine Dodrill <me@christine.website>

* emoji is really not a language

Signed-off-by: Christine Dodrill <me@christine.website>

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+---
+title: Emoji is not a Language
+date: 2021-07-14
+tags:
+ - linguistics
+ - philosophy
+---
+
+What is a language? This is something that is surprisingly controversial.
+There's some easy ways to tell when something is a language (one of them being
+that they have an army), but what about things like emoji? Is emoji a language?
+In this article I will attempt to argue that emoji is not a language unto
+itself.
+
+At a high level, language is a tool that we use to represent
+spatial/temporal/conceptual relations between objects/ideas/things, statements
+about reality and similar things among that nature. Many languages are broken
+into units of meaning that we call words. Here are some example words:
+
+- the
+- taco
+- is
+- beautiful
+
+We can break these words into two basic classes like this:
+
+| Content  | Grammar  |
+| :------- | :------- |
+| taco     | the      |
+| beautiful | is       |
+
+It's worth noting that not all verbs fall into the "grammar" category. Things
+like "eat" would fall into a content word, however "is" is a special case
+because it is directly drawing a relation between two things. In the sentence
+"The taco is beautiful", there is a relation being made from one specific taco
+and the abstract concept of beauty.
+
+I want to argue that emoji has plenty of content words, but no grammar words. If
+we wanted to assemble an analog to "The taco is beautiful" in emoji, we could
+make 1:1 correlations between English words and emoji like this:
+
+| English | Emoji |
+|:------- |:----- |
+| the     |       |
+| taco    | 🌮      |
+| is      |       |
+| beautiful | 🎀      |
+
+I dug through the entire emoji chart and was unable to find things that could be
+used for "the" and "is". Heck, even the word I used for "beautiful" was a
+stretch because the ribbon emoji is normally used that way. Is a language
+defined by words that have inherent meaning or is that meaning arbitrarily
+assigned by its users? Can I just firng out words like "xnoypt" as in "realizing
+how the word would be pronounced, Tom [xnoypted](https://youtu.be/aMgCBYgVwsI)
+out of existence"? Does that mean "xnoypt" is a word?
+
+The closest I was able to get to "the" and "is" would be metaphors that would
+fall apart when you want to discuss the actual things involved. Let's say that
+you assign arbitrary emoji at least to "is" so that you can end up with this
+sentence in emoji:
+
+🌮➡️🎀
+
+What if you want to talk about the concept of right though? Say you want to
+convey that the taco store is to the right of the office building. You'd need to
+say something like:
+
+🌮🏪➡️➡️🏢
+
+And this could be easily confused with the interpretation "taco store right
+right office building".
+
+But how do you know that it's a taco store? That's just a convention English
+follows where the thing being described is the right-most thing and other things
+on the left are just qualifiers or determiners to what's going on about it. It's
+a "taco store", not a "store taco". Other languages like French do have this
+reversed, so it could easily become a source of confusion.
+
+So what if you ripped out the grammar entirely? What if you just had something
+that was pure content? Could utterances like "🌮🏪➡️🏢" function in place of
+something that breaks apart the words into groups? How would people know the
+difference between that being a giant list of descriptors on top of a taco or an
+office building?
+
+How would you express verbs like "to eat"? Emojipedia says that 🍴 is used to
+signify eating, but what about cultures that don't use cutlery to eat with?
+Would this really be global enough to work in places like China? Cultural
+cross-contamination would likely be enough at this point that most people could
+get the message, but is this really representing the idea of eating or the idea
+of something that you can use to eat other things? Would using this mean that
+you could express what you ate with emoji? What would make it more of a concept
+of eating than "to eat", "mangxi" (Esperanto), "manger" (French), or "citka"
+(Lojban)?
+
+If language is a tool that we can use to describe relations, then we can sorta
+get them across with emoji by piggy-backing on top of the grammar of other
+languages. You can derive new words like "taco store" with phrases like "🌮🏪".
+You can use these to create meaning, I guess, but it wouldn't be very precise.
+You could get across the most common words and cultural ideas, but not much
+else.
+
+Certainly not technical things where detail is important. Where is that taco
+store in relation to the office building? Is it 5 meters to the right of it or
+500 meters? What color is the office building? What name does it have? What is
+the name of the road? What is the name of the taco store?
+
+What can you really convey with emoji that isn't also conveyed with words?
+
+You can create new words easily with some chat platforms and how they use emoji
+though. You can either describe "nonbinary people" as "🚫🔢0️1️🧍" or you can just
+upload an image of the [nonbinary pride
+flag](https://gender.wikia.org/wiki/Pride_Flags#Nonbinary_Flag) to use as a
+direct descriptor of the concept instead. In a way emoji gives you a level of
+freedom of expression that simple words can't. The word "xnoypt" makes sense to
+people that know the word, but the picture has a greater chance of being closer
+to understood on its own. Here is an emoji that my coworkers use as a loving
+description:
+
+<center>
+
+![](https://cdn.christine.website/file/christine-static/blog/friday_deploy.png)
+
+</center>
+
+This one is called `friday_deploy` and is used as the avatar of our deployment
+bot as well as a way to describe the abstract horror of deploying software on a
+Friday. By being an emoji it can represent something more than just the
+pictograph that it is. 
+
+These all certainly encode meaning on their own, but meaning on its own doesn't
+make a language. Emoji certainly could become a language, but it would need a
+lot of work to become one. Even then it would likely fall into the other
+failings that International Auxiliary Languages that have fell into. It is
+easier to type emoji than it is to type things like Esperanto's "ĉ", but it's
+going to inherently encode assumptions in the creator's first language.
+
+Emoji is not a language, it's used to augment existing languages.
+
+> If you want to claim that emoji is a language, you should be able to make that
+> same claim using emoji. Not an ad hoc cypher of the english sentence; just use
+> emoji the way people commonly use them, which you're saying counts as a
+> language, to say "Emoji is a language".
+
+- allthingslinguistic
+
+I'd be willing to be proven wrong if you can write "Emoji is a language"
+unambiguously using emoji without it being a baroque cipher of English.