Is it possible to communicate using emoji

2024 Author: Malcolm Clapton | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-17 03:44

The difficulty is that in our understanding of these symbols there is no single system.

The popularity of pictures that have penetrated the language of web communication sometimes makes us talk about the emergence of a new graphic system of signs. Whether this is so and what is emoji in general, Lifehacker and N + 1 decided to ask the linguist Maxim Krongauz.

Emoji is a very amorphous and heterogeneous phenomenon, signs and systems, different from a semiotic point of view, are mixed in it. Usually this word denotes pictograms, but it can be both linguistic signs and emoticons - emoji function in very different ways.

Is it possible to call emoji some kind of new writing, compare them with ideograms - signs that conventionally depict a particular concept? It seems to me that it is impossible. Emoji do not turn into ideograms, remaining at the level of pictograms - that is, that stage in the development of written signs that precedes ideograms. If ideograms are already linguistic signs, then pictograms are what in linguistics is usually called pre-writing.

The fundamental difference between ideograms is that a message composed of them is read in a single verbal way. The elements of ideographic writing are essentially words, linguistic signs.

A pictogram is a picture that can be interpreted in different ways. Herodotus has a famous story about how the Persian king Darius received a message from the Scythians, which consisted of a frog, a bird, a mouse and five arrows. The king and his advisers had to think hard, but they did not come to a consensus on what the Scythians wanted to tell them. Each of the objects they received had their own symbolic meaning, but they could be interpreted in different ways.

I will give an analogy that is not very correct from a linguistic point of view. A pictogram is, as it were, not a word, but its root. It can be interpreted as a verb, as a noun, and as an adverb. So a pictogram is an idea that can take different verbal expressions. For example, if you are drawing a bus, then it can mean both “bus” and “take the bus”, or something else related to the bus. Therefore, when we are dealing with prescriptiveness, we cannot say that we have a text in front of us. This is a kind of quasi-text to which different texts can be compared. It is not read in a uniform way.

Emojis are at this semiotic level - the level of prescriptiveness. It is not a language, although there are clear semiotic systems outside of language, for example, road signs. And here we are dealing with a huge variety, because Internet users come up with more and more new emoji. But all this is more for the sake of aesthetics, not for the sake of communication.

As a historical step, this is, of course, typical for children.

In my opinion, the use of emoji is a rollback to childhood, if you like, to the childhood of humanity, or just to the childhood of each of us: people around suddenly begin to actively use pictures in the text.

I'm not sure if emojis have any perspective, unlike emojis that have already taken their place.

In principle, emoji could become a kind of semiotic system, but in the conditions of the spontaneously developing Internet, this is very difficult. Now, if some world government sat down and decided: we will use emoji in this way … But this will not happen. Although emojis are now embedded in code tables, no one is even trying to agree on the rules for their use.

Against this background, it is curious to look at what happened to the emoticons. We can see that they are used today in all the cultures that are present on the Internet. But in different cultures they are used in different ways, in different messengers there are different sets of emoticons. That is, we roughly understand how to use them, but rather at the level of trends than the norms or rules that we have agreed on. Unification took place, but literally a few emoticons were affected.

We understand what a smile means, we understand what a frowning face means, but a giant set of fifty or more emoticons is practically not used.

At the same time, emoticons, in my opinion, are a very interesting communicative phenomenon, which on the Internet has its own non-trivial functions. Partly emoticons play the role of punctuation marks, partly - facial expressions, intonation. They interact with the text in an interesting way: they displace the point, get inside the sentence according to certain rules, and complete it. Emoticons compensate for the severity of formal written speech, give it the emotionality of oral speech. Therefore, we can say that people have not played enough of them yet.

It seems that emojis have partly absorbed emoticons - for example, they supplant Emoticons vs. Emojis on Twitter: A Causal Inference Approach them in tweets More emojis, less:) The competition for paralinguistic function in microblog writing, and it's not about limiting the number of characters. But what will happen to emoji next is not clear. To a large extent, it all depends on who will use them, how emoji will characterize the author of the message. Today, a smiley almost does not characterize a person in any way, and if he is younger than a certain age, then for him it is almost an obligatory element of written speech. And emoji is an optional element, and the person who uses emoji, thereby makes it clear that he belongs to a certain group, this is such a special self-characteristic from the point of view of communication.

Therefore, in my opinion, it is too early to call emoji some important achievement of our culture; it is too early to say that it is a stable element of written speech. We have to wait another five to ten years.

Here I could stick in an emoji with a Christmas tree, because I am writing these lines sitting at the dacha, but there are no clear rules on this matter, so I probably will refrain.