🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣
Highly evolved? Are you kidding? Language has been (and always will be) a mess! Because it’s a living, changing thing! You think it’s highly evolved that the “ough” letter sequence has at least EIGHT different pronunciations? Or that the three C’s in Pacific Ocean are all pronounced differently?! What evolved about that. How about the utterly random and arbitrary uses of gender in Romance languages? Can you tell me why a table in Spanish (mesa) is feminine? Or that you have to memorize thousands of often hard to read, complex symbols to communicate in Chinese or Japanese?
Languages are fascinating and interesting but they are far from some high art form that must be protected from “dumbing down”. Languages’ job is to convey meaning, as long as it can do that, it’s doing it’s job. And while the combination of letters “happy” may convey a specific meaning to you, it means jack spit to someone who only knows Korean. But guess what? If I send this emoji 😊 I can convey meaning regardless of native tongue.
After all, a picture is worth a thousand words.
Well, no, I wasn't actually kidding. We are, as a species, what would be considered to be highly-evolved, but we are also incredibly complex. A simple, single-celled creature is nowhere near as evolved but also nowhere near as complex. Highly-evolved isn't an indicator of simplicity. If anything I would say that the opposite is true. We are capable of inventing all of the wonderful things that we, as a species, have
because we are evolved, and that endows us with the ability to think in complex ways.
To deal with your examples though, I agree completely that there a number of idiosyncrasies in many languages (such as the "ough" example that you gave) which make them hard for a non-native speaker to master. The three C's is a little less extreme though in my opinion. Yes, it isn't always immediately obvious that each of those C's would sound different, but the adjacent letters simply act as modifiers to the sound which (for the most part) are fairly consistent. Perhaps a better solution would be to create new letters for the different variations of the C sound?
For example, French has multiple versions of the letter E with the different accents subtly changing the underlying sound. That seems like a reasonable compromise between the English complexity of adjacent letter modifiers and the Chinese system where every phoneme has its own distinct character.
Now, as for the gendered nouns, you are seeing that problem from the perspective of a non-native speaker. To a native speaker there is no confusion. In Italian, for example, "la scala" is a staircase. To non-native speakers you think about gender, but to an Italian, it is just "la scala". Look at is this way, just learn the language to incorporate the gendered part as a part of the word. Instead of "la scala", think of it as "lascala". Then you apply a recursive rule of
any noun starting with "la" is feminine and any noun starting with "il" is masculine. It's only problematic when you are trying to communicate across languages. Which brings me to your last point about Emoji being a cross-language communication tool.
Yes, you make a valid point about being able to express certain simplistic emotions through Emoji and I cannot, and will not, argue that. But you mention that "happy" conveys a certain meaning to me as an English speaker but would mean nothing to, for example, a Korean and this is where I have to disagree; not with the concept, but with the application.
"Happy" is a
huge word with a lot of subtlety and nuance within it. For example,
overjoyed could be classified as a type of "happy", as could
ecstatic,
elated,
joyful,
thrilled etc.; each of which have their own subtleties and unique characteristics. Yes, the
conveys that overall "big picture" emotion but it doesn't convey the particular flavour of "happy".
Which is exactly why I referred to the dumbing-down of language. You are right, on those occasions where you as a native XX language speaker need to convey a simple sign of approval to a native YY language speaker and you don't have a common language you both speak then yes, a "thumbs up" Emoji does the job. But let's be honest, what percentage of your daily communications are as simplistic as that?
If you find yourself in Korea and don't speak Korean (let's assume that nobody in Korea spoke English - or any other language that you did speak - for this example, as you did in yours) then things will go very wrong,
very quickly if you have to rely on Emoji to communicate your needs! You presented a very particular case, and I agree that it works in that case, and for simple generic emotions I agree that they are useful (as I stated in my original post about the original "smileys"). However, the virus-like proliferation of new Emoji serves little to no purpose.
How often do you honestly think that you will need to convey a Unicorn and a Football (or a Sloth and a Strawberry) to a person in a country where you don't speak the language? Will your need convey your overall sentiment of approval to a Korean fall apart if the Emoji which most accurately represents your ethnicity, gender and hair colour isn't present?
The other issue is, of course, that people rely more and more on these "fun" Emojis so you end up with lazy communication where people just miss out the details and focus on the Emojis. Sure, I could say that I am
about the fact that you 👍 being able to convey certain things...but saying that I would 👍🐟🍲for 🍽 but only if we can get 🍷as well just looks a bit ridiculous really doesn't it!
The only logical extension of the Emoji culture is to return to the Egyptian (and other) hieroglyphs...
literally taking back language thousands of years! We have for more knowledge than we had thousands of years ago, and language has (as you mentioned) evolved so that we can actually express those ideas.
It is a well-known trope that Eskimo people have many words for snow and ice. Why do you think that is? I imagine that (if it is actually true) it is because there are many different forms that "snow" and "ice" can take. So while we may say "black ice" or "snow drift", the frequency with which they have to deal with snow and ice means that it makes sense for them to develop distinct words for these different kinds of snow and ice rather than having to attach qualifier words adjacent to them to fully convey the situation. Again, evolution of language...
So what do we do? Resort to conveying only the most simplistic of ideas? It's pretty hard to put the cat back in the bag now as we have complex ideas that need to be explained somehow.
OK, so do we use a new Emoji language (Emojiglyphics) where every possible object, thought, feeling, sentiment or other concept that we want to convey can be conveyed in Emoji? That's completely unreasonable too!
Third option is we create some kind of crazy hybrid language where the base concepts are conveyed in cute little drawings but the more advanced concepts call for actual words. Again, there is little value to that as, were you in Korea and not able to speak Korean, very little of what you wanted to get across would be understood.
Or do we go for option number four where we use actual words to convey actual thoughts in a clear, precise and specific manner? Sure, it requires a bit more of an effort to find the correct combination of letters to precisely convey a particular meaning rather than just dropping an eggplant Emoji into the conversation, but come on...has it really got to the point where we are that lazy and that unable to communicate ideas?
I certainly hope not because that would be the first step towards a (personally) dark and bleak future, and would render the efforts of all of the great thinkers, philosophers, writers and scientists who worked so hard to advance humanity as little more than a "dusty relic" of a time long past...an anomalous and momentary blip as humanity reached for the stars, only to come crashing back down...
per astra ad cloaca...
