FYI: More emoji from Chrome

["Martin J. Dürst"]

On 2014/04/02 20:08, Christopher Fynn wrote:
> On 02/04/2014, Asmus Freytag <asmusf at ix.netcom.com> wrote:
>> On 4/2/2014 1:42 AM, Christopher Fynn wrote:
>>> Rather than Emoji it might be better if people learnt Han ideographs
>>> which are also compact (and  a far more developed system of
>>> communication than emoji). One  CJK character can also easily replace
>>> dozens of Latin characters - which is what is being claimed for emoji.
>>
>> One wonders why the Japanese, who already know Han ideographs, took to
>> emoji as they did....
>
> Perhaps because emoji are a sort of playful version of  a means of
> communication they are already used to

Yes. Already used to the concept that a character can represent (more or 
less) a concept. Already used to the concept that there are lots of 
characters, and a few more won't make such a difference. Already used to 
the concept that character entry means keying a word or phrase and the 
selecting what you actually want.

But I think the main reason for their spread was that the mobile phone 
companies introduced them and young people found them cute.

In a followup, Line (http://line.me/en/), the most popular Japanese 
mobile message app (similar to WhatsApp) got popular mostly because of 
their gorgeous collection of 'stickers' (over 10,000), fortunately after 
realizing that the technically correct way to deal with them was not 
squeezing them into the PUA, but treating them as inline images, 
avoiding headaches down the line for the Unicode Consortium :-).

Regards,   Martin.