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What is your opinion on the inclusion of emojis in Unicode?
Ah, Philip my old friend. I know why you’re asking, and you know where this is going.
What does Nick Nicholas’ Quora Bio on emoji say?
Emoji: Blot on the purity of Unicode
What does Nick Nicholas think about the inclusion of emojis in Unicode?
CLEANSE THEM WITH FIRE!
⛐⛏⛔⛑✘☹☠
Why does Nick Nicholas think that? Is he some sort of antiquated un-hip spoilsport?
Yes, but there’s so much more to it than that.
Unicode is meant to be an universal encoding of scripts of human languages, to be comprehensive and rigorous. It is meant to resist logos, and vanity symbols, and short term fads: it is intended to persist for the ages. It is meant to deal with finite, well-understood, stable repertoires of script signs. Inclusion of any new additions to the repertoires are meant to be pondered and debated by linguists and typographers. And it is meant to deal with communicative needs borne of real texts. Real, plain texts, not vagaries of formatting or iconography.
It’s been po-faced in the past. The German National Standards body ensured Klingon never made it into Unicode, for instance, for fear of bringing the standard into disrepute.
And then the emojis came.
It’s not just that they’re frivolous. (And yes, I also wasn’t happy about Dylan getting the Nobel for Literature.) It’s that they’re not stable, they’re not for the ages, they’re not finite, and they’re not text. Yes, they’re part of text messages. So are memes.
Emojis were included in legacy Japanese character sets, because that’s how the Japanese telcos encoded the blasted things. It was a kludge. It was not meant to be enshrined for the ages: using characters to do icons was a short term fix, and certainly not a sustainable one. Emojis are not the kinds of thing that are meant to be a well-defined, stable sign system, with additions debated by linguists and typographers: that truly defeats the purpose of emojis. Not to mention, emojis really do go against the spirit of Unicode.
But the Japanese telcos went with them, and then Apple went with them, and there we are.
The Unicode Technical Committee defends the inclusion, as they must. They say that they do not count as logos, or vanity symbols, or short term fads, and they are appropriately managed through a standards process that normally engages linguists and typographers. Not everyone in the Unicode community was convinced, but it’s done.
Damn me if I’m going to be happy about it, but.
What is your favorite phrase or line from a poem not in English?
Jane Marr! Why no A2A from you!
I’ve long been looking for an excuse to speak here of my favourite poem of all time.
It’s an odd choice. It’s an extremely formalist choice. It needs some setup.
Esperanto poetry is very formalist, for cultural reasons you can easily guess. At least, it was up through the 70s, which is what I read up to. Lots of rondels. Lots of sonnets. All sonnets Petrarchan. All rhymes meticulous.
Victor Sadler, an officer at the Universal Esperanto Association, published a slender volume in 1967, Memkritiko “Self Criticism”. (See discussion in Esperanto.) The shtick of the volume is that he found the poems in the Association archives, and he annotates them sarcastically. Very po-mo, but this would have been at the very outset of po-mo.
My favourite poem is a Petrarchan sonnet in his collection. Its subject matter is about dissolution.
Its form is about dissolution.
It’s a Petrarchan sonnet, but its verses are way too short. Trimeter and Dimeter, going down to a single foot at the end. The rhymes are off-rhymes, which is not normal in Esperanto. And in the sestet, the off-rhymes end up merging.
It’s like a sand castle, slowly washing away. Especially in the last three verses.
Mi, dezirante ĉerkon
(kapitulaci,
ekshipokrito laca,
ĉi ŝakan ŝercon),
pluportis mian serĉon
ĝis la palaco
de ĉi korpo kuraca,
en kies riĉon
mi kitelumas
pli pace miajn ostojn
ol feton lulas
la utero; kaj ekson
mian ĝi teksas
en naskon.
I, wishing for a coffin
(to quit,
a tired ex-hypocrite,
this joke of chess),
continued my search
until the palace
of this healing body,
in whose riches
I besmock
my bones more peacefully
than the womb lulls
the fetus; and it weaves
my expiration
into birth.
What are the most probable changes in grammar and vocabulary of English in the 21th century?
OK, here’s one.
’ve after modals has already been reanalysed to of; not just as a written form, but in spoken English: would of, could of, should of.
Prediction: this gets expanded further by analogy, to link other modals and auxiliaries, now that the of is no longer analysed as a verb. can of, had of.
Stranger things have happened.
No, not Stranger things of happened. There are grammatical constraints at work here.
Is the English “cuz” (because) becoming a clitic?
Not yet in my speech, but you’re pointing out something interesting.
If you pronounce them as a single word, cuzall, cuzawesome, yeah, that’s a proclitic, and that’s grammaticalisation. I don’t.
I do pronounce ’cause as a single syllable often, many do. That’s a reduction, but I think it’s still independently stressed for me, and it’s certainly with a full vowel: coz /kɔz/ (Australian English), not cuz /kəz/. If you’re doing it as a schwa, that’s consistent with more extensive reduction of the word.
If you don’t mind: what’s your English dialect?
How often did scribes have to copy an ancient text before the invention of printing in order for that text to survive throughout the centuries?
At an absolute minimum in Europe, four times. Each time there was a technological advance in book production, the superseded tech books were copied and discarded. Tech advances included:
- The introduction of papyrus
- The introduction of the codex
- The introduction of parchment
- The introduction of lowercase
Do creole languages have one “base language” or two “parent languages”?
It’s a very good question.
Normally, creoles and pidgins are put in the too hard basket of linguistic family trees for precisely that reason. It’s very hard to argue for a single parent language, as pidgins, and the creoles that arise from them, really are mixed languages, with grammar from the one, vocabulary from the other, and structures from the lowest common denominator. So people are reluctant to say Tok Pisin is either Austronesian or Germanic; they typically put it in a category of its own.
A further complication is that there is almost always a single acrolect (“White”) parent, with the possible exception of Bislama; but any number of basilect (“Black”) parents. Pidgins typically arose in plantations, where slaves or workers spoke a lot of different languages and were torn from their social context. So adopting a pidgin was a matter of necessity.
Linguists tend to dodge the question, and creoles are so distinct from both basilects and acrolects, not to mention so much more similar to each other, that the question is not really that useful. But Multiple Parents is certainly closer to the truth than Single Parent.
Will we one day communicate with pictures instead of words?
If i ever met someone from the Unicode technical committee again, I’m showing them this question, and yelling THIS! YOU MADE THIS HAPPEN!
- Rebuses do not make an international language.
- This is not the first attempt at an international symbolic language. Not by a very long shot.
For a look at this kind of thing done right (or at least, much more right), see Bliss Symbolics: Start . Being used by a whole lot of linguistically handicapped people.
Can linguists differentiate between all the sounds of the IPA?
Thanks, Khateeb!
When I was in second year phonetics in university, our exam was to do just that. Our lecturer would say some sounds, we had to write them down in IPA.
With some provisos.
- Most diacritics would count, but some of them, such as the forward/backward, raised/lowered diacritics for vowels, would not: too subtle. For that matter, we would not be expected to tell apart the 5 different versions of schwa, and I’m not sure anyone does.
- I think we were off the hook for learning the most obscure articulations: epiglottals, alveolo-palatals, and that weird Swedish combination ɧ.
- The consonants were pronounced between vowels: awa, aɥa, aɰa, aca, aka, aqa. That’s optimal for telling the difference between consonants; the auditory cues for the differences are in the transition into and out of consonants. Final unreleased consonants, such as you routinely get in Cantonese, I have found utterly impossible to hear the difference between.
I don’t have a great ear. But under ideal test conditions, and limiting ourselves to distinct IPA letters? Yes. We do.
Is there any function of swearing?
Terry Casalou has the answer here I like the most. (Vote #1: Terry Casalou’s answer to Is there any function of swearing?)
Swearing is a form of communication that includes our passion level.
I’d like to dig a little deeper. Why does swearing do that?
Breaking taboos is one mechanism of indicating passion. Not the only one, but certainly one designed to get maximum attention. It correlates with extremity of passion: you’re saying you’re so worked up, you’re prepared to violate a social taboo. It used to be taboos on religion (Goddamn, Zounds = God’s Wounds, Gadzooks = God’s Hooks), then it was taboos on sex (Fuck, Cunt, Jerk). Taboos on excretion (Shit, Piss) have never really gone away. And the taboos vary widely by culture.
There’s some constraints.
- On the one hand, the taboo has to be relevant still. Zounds now sounds ridiculous, and you have the apocryphal anecdotes of kids not brought up religious, and wondering why Jesus Christ is named after a swear word.
- On the other hand, the taboo can’t be so strong that you will trigger genuine revulsion. The taboo on racist discourse is very strong in the US, and there’s good reason for that. Saying “nigger nigger nigger” just so you can show how angry you are or to get a rise out of someone is not really a good idea—although you can see why the alt-right gets their Freedom Of Expression kicks out of it.
Different subcommunities within a language community are going to have different norms of what is acceptable. You need to be aware of those norms, to avoid either getting your head kicked in, or laughed at.
(Vote #1: Terry Casalou’s answer to Is there any function of swearing?)
What is a concise Latin translation of “Just because someone does bad things doesn’t mean bad things should happen to them”?
Etsi quis mala facit, mala ei ne fiant.
Before you get a tat with it, stay tuned for Alberto Yagos to say Yea or Nay.