Emoji Haggadah

[Martin J. Dürst via Unicode]

Hello Mark, others,

On 2019/04/16 12:18, Mark E. Shoulson via Unicode wrote:
> Yes.  But the sentences aren't just symbolic representations of the 
> concepts or something.  They are frequently direct 
> transcriptions—usually by puns—for *English* sentences, so left-to-right 
> makes sense.  So for example, the phrase "��️⌛️��️" translates "The LORD 
> our God".  For whatever reason, the author decided to go with ��️ for 
> "God" and such, and the hourglass in the middle is for "our", which 
> sounds like "hour".  See?  Ugh.  I think he uses ���� for "us" (U.S. = 
> us). In the story of the five Rabbis discussing the laws in Bnei Brak, 
> for one thing the word "Rabbi" is transcribed �� ("rabbit" instead of 
> "rabbi"), and it says they were in "������" (boy - boy - 
> cloud-with-lightning).  The two boys for "sons" (which translates the 
> word "Bnei" in the name of the city), and the lightning, "barak" in 
> Hebrew, is for "brak", the second part of the name. The front cover, 
> which you can see on the amazon page... That �� (shell) in the title? 
> Because it's saying "Haggadah shel Pesach", the Hebrew word "shel" 
> meaning "of."  The author's name?  ����♥♢♣♠ (or whatever the exact 
> ordering is): "Martin Bodek", that is martini-glass, bow, and the four 
> suits of a DECK of cards.  Sorry; see what I mean about getting carried 
> away by being able to read the silly thing?  Anyway.  The sentences are 
> definitely ENGLISH sentences, not Hebrew or any sort of language-neutral 
> semasiography or whatever, so LTR ordering makes sense (to the extent 
> any of this makes sense.)

All the examples you cite, where images stand for sounds, are typically 
used in some of the oldest "ideographic" scripts. Egyptian definitely 
has such concepts, and Han (CJK) does so, too, with most ideographs 
consisting of a semantic and a phonetic component.

There is a well-known thesis in linguistics that every script has to be 
at least in part phonetic, and the above are examples that add support 
to this. For deeper explanations (unfortunately not yet including 
emoji), see e.g. "Visible Speech - The Diverse Oneness of Writing 
Systems", by John DeFrancis, University of Hawaii Press, 1989.

Regards,   Martin.


> ~mark
> 
> On 4/15/19 10:56 PM, Beth Myre via Unicode wrote:
>> This is amazing.
>>
>> It's also really interesting that he decided to make the sentences 
>> read left-to-right.
>>
>> On Mon, Apr 15, 2019 at 10:05 PM Tex via Unicode <unicode at unicode.org 
>> <mailto:unicode at unicode.org>> wrote:
>>
>>     Oy veh!
>>
>>     *From:*Unicode [mailto:unicode-bounces at unicode.org
>>     <mailto:unicode-bounces at unicode.org>] *On Behalf Of *Mark E.
>>     Shoulson via Unicode
>>     *Sent:* Monday, April 15, 2019 5:27 PM
>>     *To:* unicode at unicode.org <mailto:unicode at unicode.org>
>>     *Subject:* Emoji Haggadah
>>
>>     The only thing more disturbing than the existence of The Emoji
>>     Haggadah
>>     (https://www.amazon.com/Emoji-Haggadah-Martin-Bodek/dp/1602803463/)
>>     is the fact that I'm starting to find that I can read it...
>>
>>     ~mark