Meet the guy trying to turn emoji into a legitimate, usable language (opens in new tab)

(washingtonpost.com)

24 pointschmullig11y ago9 comments

9 comments

8 comments · 4 top-level

chmulligOP11y ago· 2 in thread

One note of likely relevance to the HN crowd, if the Kickstarter[1] is successful, we're definitely planning to release an API + the raw data.

[1] https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/fred/the-emoji-translat...

chimeracoder11y ago

This would certainly make emojibot[0] a lot easier (and cheaper)! :)

[0] https://github.com/ChimeraCoder/emojibot

justinpombrio11y ago

You're proposing a project involving translating between two languages... do you have a linguist on board?

im3w1l11y ago· 2 in thread

>There are literally no other image-based languages.

Written Chinese started as an image-based language.

whoopdedo11y ago

If you go back far enough, what language didn't? All writing systems are derived from or borrowed from a script that in its ancient past was pictographic. Braille is the only exception I can think of.

Give emoji a few thousand years, maybe less, and it could become a proper language. I think it's already starting to evolve. The eggplant symbol has been repurposed to mean "penis". (So I've heard.)

But I think the main roadblock to the machine translator described in the article is that emoji are currently used as an adjunct to peoples' native language. Does a Japanese speaker use emoji the same way as a Russian speaker? Or German or Farsi? I suspect the answer is they don't. So trying to train an AI using texts from all these different speakers will be trying to build a Tower of Babel.

im3w1l11y ago

To write fish in chinese you write a pictogram. That pictogram is an image of a fish, except the image has evolved over the millennia to be unrecognisable.

The English word "fish" on the other hand, is not a pictogram, and its evolution has not been primarily visual. Instead it has undergone evolution in pronunciation, which has indirectly affected how the written word "looks".

1 more reply

SCAQTony11y ago

Egypt beat him to it; originally ran in the New Yorker: https://pbs.twimg.com/media/CDbYv9RWMAA-7rK.png

DigitalSea11y ago

Seems to me that writing using Emojis requires significantly more effort than writing it using just words. Besides the comical factor, I just do not see the advantage here. Correct me if I am wrong, but there would be certain phrases that you could not say in Emoji, it would struggle with slang and other made up words. I probably would not back this, but I cannot deny this is not cool and unique, I will be keeping my eyes on this to see if it goes anywhere.

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