I often receive anguished inquiries about emojis, emoticons, hanzi, hangul, kana, and similar matters. I try to answer as many of them as I can, and many of them have important implications for the nature of writing, the relationship between speech and script, cultural interactions and contexts, and so forth. Back in mid-January, there was […]
From the Library of Congress International Collections FB page (Saturday 7/17/21):
Within the last couple of years, some of my students expressed themselves by sticking this emoji — 😂 — at strategic places in their messages to me. Funny thing is that I never really knew how to interpret it. It looks like the face of someone who is laughing so hard that they are crying. Maybe […]
Look everyone! it's a post about language in China by not-Victor! :) I just had to drop everything and write this post while I was listening to the latest Reply-All podcast, this week consisting of a series of phone interviews with people around the world about the experience of the COVID-19 pandemic in their area. […]
[This is a guest post by Jichang Lulu.] A recent paper by Alex Joske features Sitar སྲི་ཐར་ (Wylie Sri thar, Chinese transcription Sita 斯塔), a senior CCP united front cadre. Sitar's career included decades at the Central United Front Work Department, of which he was a vice head between 2006 and 2016. He later became a […]
Here's an emoji: 😻 Here's an emoticon: :‐) As we will see below, the superficial resemblance of the two words is completely coincidental — even though they both have to do with the visual depiction of emotions and ideas in texts. This post began as a comment to "Emoticons as writing" (7/7/19), but it soon […]
From Charles Belov: I thought I was going to be sending you a case of Google Translate munging a song lyric when translating it from Chinese to English. Instead, I'm sending you a case of a Chinese music video making use of an emoji in the song lyrics.
Adrienne LaFrance has an eye-opening article about "The Westernization of Emoji" in The Atlantic (5/22/17). Here's the summary statement at the beginning: The takeout box and the fortune cookie are perceived as emblems of Chinese culture, when they’re actually central to the American experience of it.
Message in a store window @ 826 Valencia, San Francisco:
Today's xkcd: Mouseover title: "I'm excited about the proposal to add a 'brontosaurus' emoji codepoint because it has the potential to bring together a half-dozen different groups of pedantic people into a single glorious internet argument."
Austin Ramzy, "Julie Bishop, Foreign Minister of Australia, Raises Eyebrows With Emojis", NYT 10/22/2015: What, exactly, does that scowling, red-faced emoji mean? I’m mad? Frustrated? Sunburned? The question, which has plagued more than a few text-message exchanges, became a topic of debate in the Australian Senate on Thursday, when Foreign Minister Julie Bishop’s liberal […]
Today's announcement from the Google Chrome team (yes, note the date):
[Several days ago, I had prepared a post on this topic, but Mark scooped me with his "Mushroom language?" (1/9/24). His coverage of the counterposed Adamatzky and Blatt, et al. papers is superior to mine, so I will just strip out that part of my post and leave the remaining observations with which I had […]