On 2014/04/02 20:08, Christopher Fynn wrote:
> On 02/04/2014, Asmus Freytag <asmusf_at_ix.netcom.com> wrote:
>> On 4/2/2014 1:42 AM, Christopher Fynn wrote:
>>> Rather than Emoji it might be better if people learnt Han ideographs
>>> which are also compact (and a far more developed system of
>>> communication than emoji). One CJK character can also easily replace
>>> dozens of Latin characters - which is what is being claimed for emoji.
>>
>> One wonders why the Japanese, who already know Han ideographs, took to
>> emoji as they did....
>
> Perhaps because emoji are a sort of playful version of a means of
> communication they are already used to
Yes. Already used to the concept that a character can represent (more or
less) a concept. Already used to the concept that there are lots of
characters, and a few more won't make such a difference. Already used to
the concept that character entry means keying a word or phrase and the
selecting what you actually want.
But I think the main reason for their spread was that the mobile phone
companies introduced them and young people found them cute.
In a followup, Line (http://line.me/en/), the most popular Japanese
mobile message app (similar to WhatsApp) got popular mostly because of
their gorgeous collection of 'stickers' (over 10,000), fortunately after
realizing that the technically correct way to deal with them was not
squeezing them into the PUA, but treating them as inline images,
avoiding headaches down the line for the Unicode Consortium :-).
Regards, Martin.
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Received on Wed Apr 02 2014 - 06:27:45 CDT
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