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"Emojis" estas la nova universala lingvo
<https://groups.yahoo.com/neo/groups/reago/conversations/topics/12888;_ylc=X3oDMTJyazBwZ2kyBF9TAzk3MzU5NzE1BGdycElkAzQ2OTM5MDAEZ3Jwc3BJZAMxNzA1MjEzOTk3BG1zZ0lkAzEyODg4BHNlYwNkbXNnBHNsawN2bXNnBHN0aW1lAzE0NzM2NjQ2NzY->
Sun Sep 11, 2016 9:00 pm (PDT) . Posted by:
"Nicole" nicoledom2001
<mailto:[email protected]?subject=Re%3A%20%22Emojis%22%20estas%20la%20nova%20universala%20lingvo>
Karaj,
En Brita ĵurnalo ili skribas “It (Esperanto) never caught on. Today
there are fewer than 2,000 people who have spoken Esperanto from birth.”
http://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/smile-we-finally-have-a-universal-language-s80pt988v
La sama artikolo aperis en The Australian la 10an de septembro. Mi
kopias la tekston ĉar ŝajne nur abonantoj povas legi ĝin. Amike, Nicole
In 1887 a Jewish-Polish ophthalmologist called LL Zamenhof created a
universal language. His home town of Bialystok in present-day Poland
was divided into Russian, Polish, German and Jewish communities, each of
which spoke a different language and refused to speak any other.
A “means of international communication”, the idealistic eye doctor
decided, might bring these groups together, and so he invented
Esperanto, a language that combined the best of the rest.
It never caught on. Today there are fewer than 2000 people who have
spoken Esperanto from birth. But Zamenhof’s vision has come to pass in a
way he could never have anticipated, in the form of hundreds of tiny
pictograms attached to digital messages, tweets and texts.
Emojis are the new universal language, and the fastest growing method of
communication in the world. The lexicon of emojis has swelled from 176
in 1999 to more than 1800 images, regularly used by more than 90 per
cent of the world’s online community.
The emoji (Japanese for “picture character”) was born when a Japanese
pager company sought to add colour and emotion to otherwise bald textual
communications. That idea has spawned an entire internationally
recognised vocabulary of ideograms depicting, among other things,
weather, facial expressions, animals, flags, the Vulcan hand salute,
birthday cakes and love.
Last year the Oxford English Dictionary declared the “tears of joy”
emoji to be the word of the year. A further 38 emojis were added to the
set last year by the Unicode Consortium of tech companies, which
standardises emoji usage and ensures a symbol sent from one operating
system appears the same on another: in 2016 these included a pregnant
woman, a rasher of bacon and Mrs Santa Claus.
The emoji has become a defined auxiliary language, but evolving and
adapting as all genuine languages do. Moby-Dick has been translated into
emojis. Emoji Dick may lack some of the subtlety of Melville’s original
(“Call me Ishmael” is rendered as a telephone and a man with a
moustache), but it is very funny. Sony is developing an emoji film. The
BBC translates some news stories into emojis. The Pope has his own
emoji. Last year a Frenchman was sentenced to six months in prison for
threatening his girlfriend by sending her a gun emoji.
Inevitably, some language purists loathe emojis. As the Harvard
cognitive scientist Steven Pinker writes: “It is a failing of human
nature to detest anything that young people do just because older people
are not used to it or have trouble learning it.”
Every stage of the digital revolution in language — email, text,
Twitter, Instagram, Snapchat — has been greeted with the prediction
language will be destroyed. The Prince of Wales was at it this week. “In
these days of texting and various social media apps, the
well-constructed sentence is under mortal threat,” he moaned.
The same sort of dire prophecy was made, in the 19th century, about the
impact of sending telegraph messages that omitted prepositions and
articles. The age of wireless had no negative impact on the language.
The preposition is alive and well.
Some have attacked emojis as mere hieroglyphics, pointing out the
ancient Egyptians were unable to convey complex emotions in symbols,
while the Greeks, with their abstract alphabet and adaptive vocabulary,
could express and write down intricate literary ideas. That fails to
understand how most people use emojis.
The symbols do not supplant or denude language, but supplement and
enhance it. The pictograms do not replace words and thought, but add
visual colour. It is as if the ancient Greeks also had hieroglyphics at
their fingertips, a way of writing and illustrating writing simultaneously.
Emojis offer nuance to blunt textspeak, providing humour, sarcasm and
surprise, communicating across language barriers. In speech, facial
expression and intonation add meaning to the words we utter; emojis do
the same for the hastily written text.
Emojis, like all languages, reflect and adapt to the real world, and
carry emotional and intellectual weight. Emojis of humans now come in a
variety of skin colours; professions may be symbolised in either gender
(or none), although women, who use emojis more than men, remain
under-represented in the lexicon. Some 15,000 redheads presented a
petition to Apple demanding a ginger-haired emoji.
Politics and commerce influence this emerging language. Private citizens
and companies can apply to the Unicode Consortium for the adoption of
new emojis. British supermarket Tesco was at the forefront of the
campaign for a cheese emoji.
But ultimately the little ideograms narrow differences among people. I
can send an emoji to someone in Bialystok, with whom I have no other
language in common, and be sure of being understood. The rapid
evolution of the world’s first properly universal language would have
evoked an astonished response from LL Zamenhof; but also, surely, a
(smile emoji).
The Times
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