Today Translations is trying to put together a ready-reference guide. One of the reasons is that the emojis are evolving into different meanings from their originals. Another reason is that many cultures interpret different images differently. It’s a good idea. It says nothing for humanity’s total inability to communicate, but it may be necessary, too.
The bottom line here is that digital communications are also evolving a new range of terms, and language usage is also changing. If you remember that joke, “20 years from now ‘I heart New York’ will be a literary classic”, it’s almost come true. They, whoever they are, may have forgotten the t-shirt, but they remember the heart expression.
As a matter of fact, written text has changed a lot over time. It’s only relatively recently that English has been comparatively stable. A couple of hundred years ago, any spelling was OK, as long as you, not the reader, knew what it meant.
Those pesky reader-critters must have done something right, though. Now, most text is readable, even to writers, whether they want to read it or not. It’s more than a bit absurd to think text won’t continue to evolve, and rapidly.
A case in point is Chinese, where thousands of new characters are added to the language regularly. Chinese characters used to be pictures of specific things. Later, they became “ideographs”, which means literally an idea in graphic form. New Chinese characters are synthesized. The character for phone means literally “electric speech”.
Why wouldn’t future languages work the same way? Why not fuse emojis with text to convey more insights? Some emojis are pretty functional, too, delivering clear information to anyone, whether they speak the written language or not.
There is a possible downside – If we get to the point of “Now is the (snowflake) of our (grumpy face) made (smiley face, sun)…” mass extermination of text vandals may be required. Subtitles could be the basis of class actions, too.
One look at an emoji keyboard tells you all you need to know. They’re here, they’re evolving, they’re coming to a language near you…. Translators required, yes.
