Month: December 2018

In the previous article, I showed that it is possible to create a kind of modern-day hieroglyphic script using the ~1200 emoji characters available in Unicode. Now, let’s expand on that.

Rather than go through a formal grammar, we’ll work our way up from a few simple phrases and sentences, much in the same way as a student learning a new language. 🖼🗣 is, after all, a bit like it’s own language.

Preliminaries

First off, let’s define a few very simple words. These are all “content” words, as you’ll see; grammatical particles (what few we truly need in 🖼🗣) can come later.

• 👨 – man
• 👩 – woman
• 👤 – person
• 🧒 – child
• 🐕 – dog
• 🐈 – cat
• 👁 – eye
• 👄 – mouth
• ✋ – hand
• 👣 – foot
• 🍴 – to eat
• 🥤➡ – to drink
• 👀 – to see
• 👂➡ – to hear
• 🧠➡ – to know
• 🚶 – to walk
• 💧 – water
• 🌬 – air
• 🔥 – fire
• 🌐 – earth
• 🌞 – sun
• 🌝 – moon
• ⛅ – sky
• 🔴 – red
• 💚 – green
• 🔷 – blue
• ◻🌈 – white
• ◼🌈 – black
• ♨ – hot
• ❄ – cold
• 😃 – happy
• 😢 – sad
• 💪 – strong
• ⬜ – big
• 🧠〰 – smart

For most of these, the meanings should be fairly obvious. Some, however, are compounds. As an example, the color terms for white and black, ◻🌈 and ◼🌈, combine their first glyphs (ordinarily simple nominal particles) with 🌈, a regular derivation that makes color terms. Similarly, the numerous verbs with ➡ are derived from nouns; the second symbol here acts as a verbalizing suffix. And for adjectives, you can often use 〰, as we did with “smart”: 🧠〰.

Simplicity

The simplest sentences are those with nothing more than a subject, verb, and object. And, to make things even simpler, we’ll start with the most basic verb of all: “to be”. In 🖼🗣, that’s 👉. No need to worry about agreement suffixes or anything like that, though. For our purposes here, 👉 is all we need. (We’ll get to tenses in a later part.)

Here are a few examples to show what I mean:

• 🧒 👉 😃. – The child is happy.
• 👩 👉 🧠〰. – The woman is smart.
• 👨 👉 💪. – The man is strong.
• 🔥 👉 ♨ – Fire is hot.

Note that we don’t need any special word for “the”, either. It’s understood. (If you really think you need it, you can use 👇, though its meaning is closer to “this”.)

Our other verbs aren’t quite as easy to work with, but we can manage. The principle’s the same, after all:

• 🧒 👀 🐕. – The child sees a dog.
• 👨➿ 🚶. – The men are walking.
• 🐈 🥤➡ 💧. – The cat drinks water.

Once again, don’t worry about the difference between English simple and progressive forms. 🖼🗣 doesn’t bother distinguishing the two.

You, me, and all the rest

Today, everybody’s worried about pronouns. Well, I’ve got you covered there, because 🖼🗣 has plenty of them.

Most languages make a distinction between persons: first, second, and third. To some extent, that’s what we’ll do here, but modern communication, especially on the Internet, is more geared towards a distinction between speaker, audience, and others. (Technically, that’s all the three degrees of person represent, but bear with me.)

A speaker’s solo pronoun is 👁️‍🗨. If they’re including others (whether inside or outside their audience), then this becomes 🤲. These are like “I” and “we”, respectively:

• 👁️‍🗨 👉 🧠〰. – I am smart.
• 🤲 👉 😃. – We’re happy.
• 👁️‍🗨️ 👀 🔷 ⛅ – I see the blue sky.

(Important note: Some systems are not able to display or input the “compound” emoji 👁️‍🗨️. If yours is one of them, don’t despair. You can use 🤳 instead. It doesn’t mean exactly the same thing, as we’ll see in the next part, but it’s close enough.)

But here’s where it gets interesting. If you’re only speaking of yourself, there’s really no reason to need that cumbersome pronoun. It’s implied, because you’re the one talking. So that first sentence can become “👉 🧠〰.” instead, and it’ll mean the same thing.

Only the singular speaker pronoun can be dropped like this, which is far different from most spoken languages which allow such things.

The listener pronouns are much simpler. In fact, they’re not even pronouns at all, because there’s only one of them: 💮. Example:

• 👁️‍🗨️️ 👀 💮. – I see you.

As with English “you”, this works for both singular and plural.

Last are what most languages call the third-person pronouns. Here, 🖼🗣 has a wide variety to choose from, so let’s take a look.

• For talking about people in general: singular 👤, plural 👥
• For talking about anything not human: singular ◻, plural ◻◻
• For talking about only men: singular ♂, plural 👥♂
• For talking about only women: singular ♀, plural 👥♀

Mostly, the first two pairs should be preferred, and the “general” form is required when you’re referring to mixed groups. And, of course, using the “non-human” pronouns when you want to talk about people is just wrong.

Some examples using these pronouns:

• 👥 👉 😃. – They are happy.
• ♂ 👉 ⬜ 👨. – He is a big man.
• 👀 ◻. – I see it.
• 👥♀ 👂➡ 💮. – They (i.e., those women) can hear you.

Possessed

Last in this little lesson, we’ll discuss the possessive form. As with many parts of 🖼🗣, that’s a little different from what you might expect. In fact, it’s one of the few cases where the script recycles English punctuation.

Our key here is the apostrophe, or single quote mark: ‘. When put between two nouns (pronouns included), it indicates that the first possesses the second. So we might say 🧒’🐈 for “the child’s cat” or ♂’✋ for “his hand”.

These aren’t exactly compound nouns, but they can function much like them, fitting into sentences with ease.

• 👁️‍🗨️’👁 👉 🔷. – My eyes are blue.
• ♀’🧒➿ 👉 😃. – Her children are happy.
• 👀 ⬜ 👨’🐕➿. – I see the man’s big dogs.

In the last example above, you can see a difference between the script and English, as far as word order is concerned. The possessive “attaches” to the head noun, even if there are modifying adjectives before it.

Also, you can “chain” possessives, as in ♂’🧒’👁➿ “his child’s eyes”.

Moving forward

Now that you’ve seen a little bit more of this experiment, does it still seem so outlandish? Stay tuned, as this series will delve even deeper into the weird world of emoji, and the strange things we can accomplish when our language is allowed to use nothing else. 👀▶ 💮 🔜!