Re: Emoji: emoticons vs. literacy

From: Michael D'Errico (mike-list@pobox.com)
Date: Tue Jan 06 2009 - 00:00:28 CST

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    > And if this new crab emoji was written as "カニ" in emoji quotes (if
    > Google translate is to be trusted),
    > there would be no need to guess.

    But you're missing the point of using a widely-recognized Unicode
    subset for the emoji script (and any other such encoding script).
    It's to have the most people worldwide understand it. If you think
    that this should be limited to Japanese, you are ignoring the fact
    that the vast majority of people know English, and that includes
    quite a few Japanese people (and more every day no doubt). Also
    the spelling of these things being rendered, such as "[crab]", is
    just a fallback for when software doesn't recognize it and wants
    to display something in its place.

    And if in the case of the emoji, the mobile phone makers adamantly
    want to write the emoji identifiers in katakana (or is it hiragana?)
    then they can propose their own emoji script with the knowledge
    that people outside Japan will likely not understand it, and it
    would have to be encoded somewhere else since planes C & D would
    have to be uniform throughout to allow for fallback rendering.

    >>> No more than any existing quotes create a "quotation mode".
    >> Yes, more. The text between the quotes is rendered the same as if
    >> the quotes were not there.
    >
    > How do the quoted lines above look in your MUA? Plain text with >
    > chars, or an indented paragraph with a vertical bar?
    > Gmail colors and indents plain text quoted with >'s, and I don't see
    > anyone complaining.

    And this has nothing to do with modes. It is simply a different way
    to display the nested quotes.

    >> If you have an EMOJI_LEFT_QUOTE, then
    >> you are saying the text up until the EMOJI_RIGHT_QUOTE should be
    >> used to select an emoji glyph. That is a mode.
    >
    > Compare with "if you have a > at the beginning of the line, then you
    > are saying the text up until the line that does not start with a >
    > should be displayed indented and colored". That is also a mode, so
    > what?

    Sure, but the text that is a different color is still the same, with
    the same meaning.

    Mike



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