Emoji Language Reference Grammar
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Emoji Language Reference Grammar Thomas Heller June 16, 2021 Contents 1 Introduction 3 1.1 Goals ...................................... 3 1.2 Challenges .................................... 3 1.2.1 Abstract emoji ............................. 3 1.2.2 Ambiguous emoji ............................ 4 1.2.3 Rejected emoji ............................. 4 1.2.4 ”Twin” emoji .............................. 4 1.3 Foundation ................................... 5 2 Phonology 5 2.1 Spelling Emoji Language ............................ 5 3 Writing system 5 3.1 Spacing ..................................... 6 3.2 Punctuation ................................... 6 3.3 Digital input .................................. 6 4 Morphology 7 4.1 Nouns ...................................... 8 4.1.1 Number ................................. 8 4.1.2 Possession ................................ 9 4.1.3 Demonstrativeness ........................... 9 4.1.4 Locative prefixes ............................ 10 4.1.5 Instrumental prefix ........................... 13 4.1.6 Benefactive prefix ........................... 14 4.1.7 Equative prefix ............................. 14 4.1.8 Compound nouns ............................ 14 4.2 Pronouns .................................... 15 4.2.1 Personal pronouns ........................... 15 4.2.2 Demonstrative pronouns ........................ 15 1 4.2.3 Reflexive pronouns ........................... 16 4.3 Verbs ...................................... 16 4.3.1 Tense .................................. 17 4.3.2 Mood .................................. 17 4.3.3 Negation ................................ 19 4.4 Adjectives/Adverbs ............................... 19 4.5 Numerals .................................... 20 4.6 Comparison ................................... 21 4.6.1 Comparing adjectives ......................... 22 4.6.2 Comparing adverbs ........................... 22 4.6.3 Comparing verb phrases ........................ 23 5 Syntax 23 5.1 Basic statements ................................ 23 5.2 Place, manner and time ............................ 24 5.3 Verbal adjunct fronting ............................ 24 5.4 Yes-no questions ................................ 25 5.5 Wh-questions .................................. 26 5.6 Imperative, hortative, jussive ......................... 29 5.7 Subordinate clauses .............................. 29 5.7.1 Relative clauses ............................. 30 5.7.2 Content clauses ............................. 32 5.8 Conjunctions .................................. 34 6 Pragmatics 36 6.1 Greetings .................................... 36 6.2 Affirmation/Denial ............................... 36 6.3 Courtesy ..................................... 36 6.4 Direct speech .................................. 37 6.5 Date and time ................................. 38 6.6 Remote past and future ............................ 38 7 Lexicon 39 7.1 Derivational morphology ............................ 39 7.2 Flag spelling .................................. 39 8 Appendix 41 8.1 Morphosyntax overview ............................ 41 9 Acknowledgements 41 Abbreviations 41 2 1 Introduction The Emoji Language ( ) is a constructed language with a logographic writing system that consists solely of Unicode Emoji. It was created by Thomas Heller in 2021. The language exhibits an agglutinative morphology and VSO syntax. More information about the Emoji Language can be found on the Emoji Language website at: https://tmh.conlang.org/emoji-language/ 1.1 Goals The goal of the Emoji Language project was to prove that Unicode Emoji can be used to build a fully functioning language that can potentially be used for everyday conver- sation. At the same time, I wanted to make the language actually practical to use and avoid needless complexity in the grammar, so that people could actually have fun using the language. Also, from a technical point of view, the language is supposed to work with any recent device that supports Unicode Emoji, without installing extra software. 1.2 Challenges 1.2.1 Abstract emoji Unicode Emoji already contain a lot of symbols that can be used to represent specific, tangible concepts without having to tweak their definitions. For example, the emoji and can be added to the dictionary straight away as nouns symbolizing “apple” and “guitar”, respectively. However, due to their static visual nature, emoji make it difficult to express more abstract and dynamic concepts: • Copular and modal verbs (e.g. “to be”, “must”) • Verbs in general (e.g. “to give”, “to take”) • Nouns for categories (e.g. “animal”, “fruit”) 3 There is a limited number of abstract emoji – such as arrows – that can be used to express abstract concepts, like tense or location. When defining the lexicon, I had to find a good balance in an attempt not to waste these rare symbols. It quickly became apparent that identical emoji would have to be used for both noun and verbs meanings. Such homonyms prevent the reader from recognizing the lexical category of an emoji by just looking at it, but are necessary to express basic concepts with the limit set of Unicode Emoji. 1.2.2 Ambiguous emoji Since emoji have been around several years, people already developed habits regarding their use, and not everyone agrees on the meaning of certain emoji. The Emoji Language, however, must be quite strict when defining the meaning of some emoji, to ensure that basic concepts can be expressed unambiguously. For very common emoji like and I tried to stick with their familiar meaning. Nonetheless, Emoji Language is a language in its own right. Like with other foreign languages, and even though it seems partially familiar, its vocabulary must be learned explicitly. 1.2.3 Rejected emoji Several emoji proposals were already rejected1 and thus must be represented using ex- isting emoji. 1.2.4 ”Twin” emoji A few emoji exist in pairs with little or almost no discernible difference, such as: • and (some fonts even depict both pins with the same angle) • and (some fonts even depict both cars with the same color) To avoid possible confusion for the readers, the best course of action was often to de- clare these emoji as synonymous, with the obvious downside of reducing the number of available emoji further. 1See http://randomguy32.de/unicode/misc/rejected-emoji-proposals/ 4 1.3 Foundation The Emoji Language is currently based on the Full Emoji List (v13.0), available from the Unicode Consortium: https://unicode.org/emoji/charts-13.0/full-emoji-list. html That list contains a total of 3,304 emoji when taking all possible combinations of gender, skin tone and other modifiers into account.2 Some emoji3 are available as both a black and white as well as a color variant. In such cases, the color variant should be used whenever possible, to keep the presentation of emoji consistent. 2 Phonology As Emoji Language is primarily a visual language, there isn’t any phonology per se, and, technically speaking, there are no phonemes or syllables. 2.1 Spelling Emoji Language Even though Emoji Language doesn’t have any pronunciation by itself there is a need to communicate individual emoji symbols verbally, like when teaching Emoji Language to others or discussing Emoji Language in general in another language. In such instances, the CLDR Short Name from the Full Emoji List mentioned above should be used to refer to individual emoji symbols.4 3 Writing system Emoji Language is written using Unicode Emoji and therefore does not make use of any other familiar glyphs such as letters of the Latin alphabet or punctuation. (For more information about spelling names from the Latin alphabet, see the Flag spelling section.) 2See https://unicode.org/emoji/charts-13.0/emoji-counts.html 3See https://unicode.org/emoji/charts-13.0/emoji-variants.html for a complete list. 4Note that CLDR Short Names may change in the future. For more information about CLDR, see: https://unicode.org/emoji/format.html#col-name 5 3.1 Spacing Each word is separated by horizontal spacing. Because there is no emoji symbol that represents a full stop, each sentence must start in a new line. To increase readability, it is recommended to add one extra blank line between sentences, and two between paragraphs. Emoji Language is typically written from left to right, however, if the default text direction of the writer’s input device is right to left and the reader expects it as well, this writing direction is by all means acceptable as well. 3.2 Punctuation The gesture is used for quotation marks, for example: (1) say M.3sg “ shine sun[nom] ” ‘He says: “The sun shines.”’ Aside from that, there are no distinct punctuation marks, although the symmetric sub- ordinate clause emoji serve a similar purpose (see Subordinate clauses). 3.3 Digital input To make Emoji Language work in practice, people need some way to input emoji quickly and easily. Current smartphone keyboards usually hold a history of recently used emoji for fast access, which is a step in the right direction, and they usually offer to search for emoji by CLDR Short Name a well. As a rule of thumb, people should not need to type more keystrokes to enter an emoji than they would need to enter the corresponding word in English. To optimize emoji input on desktop devices further, I have created an experimental Emoji Input Tool that can be found here: https://tmh.conlang.org/emoji-language/emoji-input.html 6 4 Morphology Technically speaking, a single emoji could be considered a single morpheme. Looking at the Unicode Emoji standard, there are several emoji that consist