The Allusionist 13. Mixed Emojions
Jun 17, 2015
A playful dive into whether emoji can carry grammar and order, and how users create face-first syntax and state through sequences. A historian traces parallels to ancient pictographs and medieval marginalia. Builders of an emoji-only messenger reveal practical limits, cross-platform misreads, and how emoji form social dialects rather than replace language.
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Emoji As Modern Pictographs
- Emoji function like early pictographic writing by representing ideas rather than sounds.
- Dr Kate Wiles compares emoji to the early stages of cuneiform as shorthand for concepts.
Unicode Controls Emoji Inclusion
- The Unicode Consortium standardises characters and decides which emoji join the core set.
- At recording there were 722 core emoji and about 1,393 including skin tones and flags.
Emoji Expand Emotional Punctuation
- Emoji add emotional nuance beyond limited punctuation like ! and ?.
- They serve as emotive embellishments rather than a true shorthand for language.
