yellow men
The first use of text symbols to depict emotions began on September 19, 1982; this was suggested by professor Scott Fahlman of Carnegie Mellon University. At the time, thematic “bulletin boards” were a popular form of internet communication. Most of the posts were serious: concert announcements, requests for information, things like: “I just found a ring in the men’s room on the fifth floor. Who does it belong to?” But many tried to write with humor, and readers did not always catch the irony.
“This issue has led some of us to suggest (semi-seriously) that it might be a good idea to clearly flag posts that should not be taken seriously. Various “joke marks” were suggested, and in the middle of the discussion, it occurred to me that the character sequence 🙂 might be an elegant solution that could be handled by modern ASCII-based computer terminals,” says Fahlman.
The tradition quickly took root and gradually spread to other universities around which the Internet initially developed.
Such symbols became popular in the 1990s, when correspondence in Internet chat rooms became common. At that time, the main form of distance communication was the phone call, and at first glance, text messages provided less room for the expression of emotions. Therefore, sarcasm can be conveyed as ;-), surprise as ¯\_(ツ)_/¯.
First Emoji Set
NTT DOCOMO, INC.
These signs are still periodically used, especially by people of the older generation who lived through those times. Emoji pictograms were invented by Japanese designer Shigetaka Kurita in 1999. He wanted to develop an attractive interface to convey standardized information in a simple and concise way: for example, a weather forecast cloud instead of the word cloudy, a landline phone icon, or a movie camera icon. Interestingly, the 176 original emojis did not include the now-popular “thumbs up” or laughing people, but there were signs of a heart, including “cat” and “dog,” moon phases, a bomb, and a broken heart. Development belonged to the Japanese mobile Internet provider DOCOMO, but it was quickly copied by competitors, and pictogram images became popular throughout Japan.
The phenomenon remained regional until the late 2000s, when a group of Google and Apple engineers proposed adding 625 emoji to Unicode, the Internet character encoding standard that would allow characters to be represented in all of the world’s major written languages. The proposal was accepted, and in 2010 emoji became the same symbol as letters or Chinese characters. They are included in on-screen keyboards in iOS and Android systems.
There was also a political struggle, although it is difficult to imagine a less politicized topic than communication through small drawings. For example, some were outraged: Why are there six different symbols for sushi but not for burritos or salad dressing? Why are so many professional icons almost all men? Why are the people in emojis white (even though they are actually yellow)? Why does Israel have a flag but Palestine has no flag? Many of these requests have gradually been taken into account by developers, and some platforms, such as Telegram, allow you to choose food from a very wide selection, as well as a person of any gender or skin color.
Ancient Egyptian script – the first emoji
From a historical perspective, Shigetaka Kurita did not invent anything radically new. The first human records consisted of ideograms, symbols that expressed a specific idea, object, or phenomenon. They should not be identified by hieroglyphs: for example, Chinese characters consist of a series of individual ideograms. On the contrary, in some cases the hieroglyph serves to convey a separate sound, otherwise such a writing system would be too rigid and would not be able to convey the sound of foreign names.
Comparative evolution of Mesopotamian, Egyptian and Chinese writing systems
Maspero, G.
Similarly, ideograms should not be confused with pictograms, which depict a specifically drawn object. If we read emojis as pictograms, “plane” cannot mean travel and “man with clear glasses” cannot mean boring or clever.
The antecedent of emoji can be considered ancient Egyptian writings; Middle Eastern cuneiform also contained ideograms, but they had lost their similarity to the original objects. Some ancient Egyptian symbols will be understandable to a modern person without requiring preparation. For example, these four emojis mean “sun”, “house”, “cane” and “mountain”.
Sun, house, cane and mountain emoji
One of the exhibits at the Israel Museum in Jerusalem shows the correspondence between modern emoji and ancient Egyptian hieroglyphic symbols. For example, the symbol “mountain” can mean “foreign country”.
The archaic ideographic symbols of Sumerian cuneiform also vaguely resemble emojis. For example, these signs mean “head”, “fish”, “arrow”, “star”.
Signs “head”, “fish”, “arrow”, “star”
“Typographic sign of a smile”
Although Scott Fahlman is considered the father of text emoticons, emoji-like characters have been around for a long time. For example, a schematic smile sign was drawn on a 3,700-year-old sherbet jug found during excavations in modern Turkey, where the Hittite city of Carchemish is located. It is not known what exactly the author of the drawing wanted to express, but the schematic image of a smile has not changed for thousands of years.
HDNER/twitter.com
Fahlman’s idea was also anticipated by the 17th-century Slovak notary Jan Ladislaides. In one of the reports WroteWhen he saw that the documents he was working on did not raise any objections, he signed it and drew a diagrammatic satisfied face next to it.
Ring Axel Springer/Barcroft
Finally, the Russian-American writer Vladimir Nabokov dreamed up a special sign for a smile, although not entirely seriously.
“I often think there needs to be a special typographic sign to indicate a smile; something like a curved line running behind a bracket; That’s the symbol I would put in place to answer your question,” he said in an interview with the New York Times.
Source: Gazeta
Barbara Dickson is a seasoned writer for “Social Bites”. She keeps readers informed on the latest news and trends, providing in-depth coverage and analysis on a variety of topics.