[HN Gopher] Emoji History: The Missing Years
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Emoji History: The Missing Years
Author : simonpure
Score : 130 points
Date : 2024-05-12 02:17 UTC (20 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (blog.gingerbeardman.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (blog.gingerbeardman.com)
| fouc wrote:
| Honestly, I kinda feel like emojis don't technically start until
| they actually showed up with multiple colors & some sense of
| depth / 3d-like look.
| msephton wrote:
| When would that be?
| kergonath wrote:
| Why, though? I don't think 2D versus pseudo-3D is a significant
| difference. They are still used the same way, in the same
| contexts, and mean the same thing. Also, a lot of the common
| representations went back to flat, or never made it to 3D in
| the first place.
| deruta wrote:
| I concur. Consider TFA. The symbols are not converted to from
| ASCII smileys and are used like an extension of the charset.
| Conversely, I remember web chatrooms in the mid-00s, where a
| colon-paren would always be converted to the service's
| pallette's rendition of an emoticon, pretty color and 3D to
| beat.
|
| Plus, there's a question of how people use them, but that
| distinction I think came later
| msephton wrote:
| Interesting to note that I can still type colon-paren today
| and have it converted, but usually to an emoji instead of the
| forum smiley gif. On Discord, GitHub, etc
| gumby wrote:
| This is great work. I remember seeing them on my keitai mid 90s
| but feeling that they were familiar. So filling in some gaps like
| this helps me not feel like I was crazy.
| msephton wrote:
| Happy to have helped put your mind at ease!
| tkgally wrote:
| One of the things that has fascinated me about emoji is that they
| are a type of character that had been largely unfamiliar to most
| of the world: ideograms. While their emergence in a country with
| a well-established ideographic writing system--Japan, kanji--may
| not be surprising, their widespread adoption in places that had
| basically used only alphabets is, at least to me.
|
| I wonder to what extent emoji use might evolve so that people
| without a common spoken language can use them to communicate with
| each other, the way classical Chinese has historically been used
| in East Asia. Judging from some emoji-filled comment sections
| I've seen on streaming platforms, it seems that that evolution
| may have already begun.
| pflenker wrote:
| Interesting! So far I have seen the opposite - that different
| sub groups speaking the same language assign different meanings
| to different emojis, leading to misunderstandings when
| communicating cross-group. For example, the ubiquitous laugh-
| to-tears emoji means genuine amusement for some, sarcastic,
| sometimes even malicious laughter for others.
| deruta wrote:
| Isn't it?! There's plenty of talking about how "we're
| regressing to hieroglyphs", but that doesn't capture the
| nuance in usage of emojis in different languages.
|
| Your example expands well to old-school emoticons. Where I
| live, an "xD" serves as a laugh and is used in rather general
| way. Meanwhile in the Anglosphere it's stereotypically
| associated with specific demographics
| Dibby053 wrote:
| What demographics?
| lolinder wrote:
| As an American who uses it (well, a variant, XD) and
| knows where I adopted it, I'll hazard a guess: millennial
| men who were extremely online in the late 2000s and early
| 2010s, during the Golden Age of phpBB and before the rise
| of the smartphone and modern social media.
| msephton wrote:
| FWIW phpBB was released in year 2000, just to place that
| on the timeline.
| thih9 wrote:
| > I wonder to what extent emoji use might evolve so that people
| without a common spoken language can use them to communicate
| with each other
|
| I'm guessing the availability and quality of automatic
| translators is the limiter in this kind of emoji evolution.
|
| Most of the popular social media platforms already allow their
| users to translate content (posts, comments, subtitles in
| video, etc) into their language.
| msephton wrote:
| Why translate text to and from languages when we can get
| across concepts using only emoji? Of course not for
| everything but for a lot of stuff. Definitely room for both
| to co-exist.
| wddkcs wrote:
| Emojis capture emotional context. Definitions would track with
| groups of similar temperament.
| kubanczyk wrote:
| My daughter sending me a car emoji has nothing to do with
| emotional context.
| wddkcs wrote:
| Your ignorance of the content doesn't rule out it's
| existence
| hypercube33 wrote:
| I mean the Internet adopted ASCII emoji like smilies and what
| not pretty early on from what I know. Also capslock for yelling
| is pretty widely known but I don't think there is any way other
| than chat or word of mouth people pick up on a lot of these.
| GolDDranks wrote:
| ASCII smilies are not emojis though, they are repurposing
| other chracters for building emoticons as ASCII art.
|
| Emojis (Hui /e = picture, Wen Zi /moji = character) refer to
| characters that represent a picture of something as a single
| character.
| lolinder wrote:
| This is something of a distinction without a difference
| when we're talking about Western use of ideographic writing
| in general. Ideographs that are put together from existing
| symbols are still ideographs if the final shape represents
| an idea that it also physically resembles. Emoticons were
| widely used in exactly the same place where we find emoji
| today, and were conceptually perceived as atomic units, not
| as colon + parenthesis or whatever.
|
| What makes an emoji different than an emoticon is mostly
| that some official body gave official recognition to the
| emoji's existence by adopting it in Unicode and didn't do
| so for the emoticon.
| numpad0 wrote:
| I think GP is kind of also correct, since emojis were
| more of first person expressions[1] while emoticons and
| kaomoji[2] tended to be second person.
|
| 1: :seedling:, :eyes:, :bow:, :ok_woman:, ...
|
| 2: Yan Wen Zi , "face-moji", e.g. `(1*b*)w`
| lolinder wrote:
| I'm not sure that I agree. Maybe the kaomoji were used
| for second/third person (I haven't used them much), but
| :) :( :D and friends aren't any less first person
| expressions than most emoji are.
| eloisant wrote:
| Still, they have the same purpose.
|
| Emoji were easy to implement in Japanese because they
| already had an input system, and all the UI to turn
| phonetic into single characters: hana>Hua . From there
| it's trivial to implement hana> as well.
|
| They become easier to implement in European languages as
| we got predictions, and touch screens, but until then
| implementing emoji would have been much more complex.
| numpad0 wrote:
| The point is, although emoji as known now come with rich
| selection of emoticons, same didn't apply to earlier
| Japanese emoji sets.
|
| "Emoji present on the Sharp PI-4000 (1994)" from the
| article shows 20+ animals(12 from Chinese calendar), 9
| relatives(grandpa, baby, so on), 3 types of alcohol(beer,
| sake, cocktail), and _two smileys_ , one happy and one
| angry, out of 160 symbols. That's quite unlike typical
| non-Japanese emoticon sets before iOS emoji.
|
| Granted, the Sharp pocket computer emoji wouldn't have
| been designed for chat, so there would have been less
| need for emoticons - but if you look at the list of emoji
| implemented in phones from NTT doCoMo and J-PHONE had
| back then linked in the article, there are just 5 each,
| neither even having a single circular smiley.
| euroderf wrote:
| Ideograms are "too far gone" to be recognisable to Western
| readers now - too evolved away from their roots, when different
| writing instruments were used. So FWIW I would expect that your
| hypothetical future emoji conlang will not resemble them. Maybe
| it will look like an AI has redesigned airport symbology ?
| cubefox wrote:
| This doesn't discuss Internet forum software which allowed
| including "emojis" in text, via small predefined GIF images. Was
| this a later development? There were also instant messengers like
| ICQ and AIM, but they only came out in 1996/1997, and I don't
| know whether they had "emojis" from the start.
| msephton wrote:
| It's a good point, but my research was specific to Japanese
| emoji, given they invented the word and their symbols are the
| ones that were adopted.
|
| I'd be interested to read a similar deep dive into
| forum/ICQ/AIM emoticon history. I only remember them from
| around year 2000 though I'd been an internet user since 1995.
| msephton wrote:
| Just checked and phpBB was released in year 2000.
| toast0 wrote:
| In that timeframe, those were emoticons or sometimes just
| smileys. Emoji and emoticons have a different background, and
| have a totally different etymology, despite sharing the first
| three letters and sharing some subjecy matter.
|
| I don't recall seeing much, if any, discussion of emoji until
| they rose to power towards the end of the 00s.
| cubefox wrote:
| That's just a terminological difference though. Both solve
| the same problem by inserting tiny faces into text.
| layer8 wrote:
| The difference is that with emoticons you could invent your
| own combinations and variations. Different people would use
| different variations of basically the same emoticon. You
| could come up with new ones hat hadn't been used before.
| With emojis, you have a fixed set, and it is what it is.
|
| Another difference is that emoticons blend in to the text
| visually. Your eyes aren't draw to them like they are when
| you have a paragraph of text with colorful emoji sprinkled
| in-between, which can be much more jarring.
| msephton wrote:
| I think this is why the accepted timeline until this week
| began with the induction of emoji into Unicode, and their
| inclusion on the iPhone that introduced them to the West.
| There was a little bit of "oh, mobile phones and pagers" and
| nobody did any more digging until my blog post.
| numpad0 wrote:
| Those were parallel developments, but after Google standardized
| Unicode emoji for use with Gmail and Apple implemented emoji on
| iOS for Japanese market support, Apple continued to expand
| emoji set with bunch of smileys and human upper torsos, thereby
| consuming those emoticons into emojis.
|
| I'm not well versed in those part of cultures, but IIUC, yellow
| smileys and semirealistic humans weren't focus of Japanese
| emoji implementations, whereas it is in Apple iOS emoji set.
| b33j0r wrote:
| Between ginger bill (the creator of odin lang) and
| gingerbeardman, nordic redness is really having its moment in the
| sun! Tim Minchin, we need you back to narrate.
| msephton wrote:
| The funny thing is that I don't even have a ginger beard! It's
| a long story. -- msephton aka gingerbeardman
| totetsu wrote:
| Some of those very really ones are starting to look like karuta
| card symbols
| twic wrote:
| > The characters *Jin and *bi were invented by the author
| Kazuhiro Watanabe in 1984 in his book Kinkonkan. These were
| quickly accepted into Japanese vocabulary, and they won a
| buzzword award at the time. And they are right there in the Sharp
| emoji, represented as characters enclosed in circles. They were
| in common use throughout Japan's bubble-era, 1986-1991. The words
| eventually fell out of fashion and are now considered obsolete.
|
| What do these mean? What is this book? What is the story here?
| Anon1096 wrote:
| From:
| https://ja.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E5%9B%B2%E3%81%BF%E6%96%87%E5...
|
| > Du Bian He Bo no{Jin Hun Juan } de, [Wan Jin ] ((Jin) , Jin
| Chi chi)to[Wan bi] (bi, Pin Fa )gaShi Yong sare, korehaLiu Xing
| Yu Da Shang woShou Shang shita.
|
| They mean rich and poor
| kitten_mittens_ wrote:
| Neither of these terms seem to exist on wiktionary.
| msephton wrote:
| These are individual characters that cannot be easily typed
| as they are enclosed in a circle and, as noted in the blog
| post, only included in some character sets for a limited
| time.
|
| Most commonly they are typed as a circle followed by the
| character as in *bi and *Jin (used in my blog post) or
| enclosed in brackets to approximate a circle as in(Jin
| )and(bi)or you can type unicode joining character to have
| the characters overlap each other as at
| https://ja.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wei miWen Zi #Jia Ming Wen Zi
|
| - https://ja.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jin
|
| - https://ja.wikipedia.org/wiki/bi
|
| The characters that are circled are:
|
| - https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Jin #Japanese
|
| - https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/bi#Japanese
|
| This is somewhat related to the paragraph about Wikipedia
| that I put in the blog post. 1984 was very pre-internet and
| this stuff only happened in Japan. So, there are many
| references to Maru-kin *Jin and Maru-bi *bi in the book,
| and on the internet, and they're mentioned on Japanese
| wikipedia. But whether or not there's enough quality
| citations from verifiable sources to please English
| Wiktionary or Wikipedia is a battle I simply don't have the
| energy to get into these days. I'd encourage you to ask any
| sufficiently old Japanese person and they will let you know
| all about this era, and then gather enough quality cites.
|
| Unicode comes close for kin (metal/rich):
|
| - Circled https://www.compart.com/en/unicode/U+328E
|
| - Parenthesized https://www.compart.com/en/unicode/U+322E
|
| ...but not for bi (poor)
|
| After the book, and the 84Nian noRi Ben Liu Xing Yu
| (Japanese Buzzwords Award 1984), these symbols also
| featured in a movie based on the book
|
| - https://www.nikkatsu.com/movie/26211.html
| BlueTemplar wrote:
| Why would you update the English Wikipedia before the
| Japanese one ?
| msephton wrote:
| Why wouldn't I? I'm a native English speaker. But, I
| won't be updating any wikis as I don't enjoy it.
| uasi wrote:
| Circled or parenthesized kin also means kinyoubi
| (friday), so it's not surprising that Unicode only
| includes maru-kin.
| qingcharles wrote:
| I think Matt must have updated the article since you posted :)
| aaronscott wrote:
| If you find this topic interesting, David Imel put together a
| fantastic deep dive. He spent four months of research, went to
| Japan to interview the creator of emoji, and put together a very
| good video on the topic[0].
|
| [0] https://youtu.be/g-pG79LOtMw?si=htnop9jpjmE3kQ75
| msephton wrote:
| It's a well produced video, I watched it and commented on it
| last week. At that point my blog post was half written but my
| research was already complete.
|
| I applaud David for going to Japan, great to see such
| dedication. My issue with the video is that it simply retreads
| the accepted timeline rather than doing any critical research.
| He was in Japan and could have done some real digging, you
| know? What was he doing for four months? Just editing the
| video? I don't know. So, I think the content of the video is
| not a deep dive at all, as it doesn't uncover anything new.
| None of the stuff I uncovered for my blog post is covered. And
| we can now see more clearly than ever that Shigetaka Kurita is
| not the creator of emoji, but rather the creator of the most
| well-know set of emoji that was perhaps the first use of the
| sparkle emoji. That's a pretty big difference.
|
| BTW my research was conducted in my free time over less than
| two weeks. It consisted of some googling, talking with Japanese
| friends, reading Japanese wikipedia (with browser translation,
| as can't read it natively) and that is all from the comfort of
| my own desk. So I would say anybody is capable of having done
| this.
|
| Of course, I had the bonus of being clued in that earlier
| history existed thanks to the device I had in my hands. But my
| point is that we should always question sources and accepted
| history, because more often than not there's additional story
| to be told.
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