Group items tagged

Decoding pictures as part of communication has been at the root of written language since there was such a thing as written language. "What is virtually certain," writes Andrew Robinson in Writing and Script: A Very Short Introduction, is "that the first written symbols began life as pictures." Pictograms-i.e., pictures of actual things, like a drawing of the sun-were the very first elements of written communication, found in Mesopotamia, Egypt, and China. From pictograms, which are literal representations, we moved to logograms, which are symbols that stand in for a word ($, for example) and ideograms, which are pictures or symbols that represent an idea or abstract concept. Emoji can somewhat magically function as pictograms and ideograms at the same time.

emojis were born from a man named Shigetaka Kurita back in the late 1990s. They came up with emojis as a way to appeal to teens. Emoji which is a japanese neologism means "picture word". A bunch of different emojis can actually be traced back to some Japanese custom or tradition.

"The most Chinese of Chinese ideograms was identified as 和 (pronounced 'huh' and typically Romanized as 'he')-the character for an indistinct concept often (though clumsily) translated as "peace" or "togetherness.""

As emoji have become more specific in both their appearance and their meaning, their ideographic flexibility has eroded. Emoji are transforming into a large catalog of fixed portraits, rather than a smaller set of flexible ideograms.