Post #3955448

2026-07-17 15:38 UTC

☝️ However, there is some evidence that #emojis or at least symbols similar to emoticons were used before the internet. Many people know "rebus" examples where words are replaced by little icons like in this children's book. And I've seen an example of a hand-written letter with emoji-like faces as annotations (but I can't find it right now on my computer 😬 ) #emojis #linguistics #WorldEmojiDay

Replies (1)

@tschfflr@fediscience.org 2026-07-17 15:44

Two other writing systems are often compared to #emojis: #Chinese characters and #hieroglyphs. @Kuchenschwarte@fnordon.de I'm not really an expert on either, but I did study Chinese in university and recently had a long conversation with an Egyptologist colleague (who gave me the 101 on hieroglyphs 😄 ). Egyptian hieroglyphic writing was an alphabet (ie, each character roughly corresponds to a sound like p, t, k). So while the hieroglyphs resemble objects, they were not read as such, at least not in the later stages. (Btw. Latin characters also developed from picture-like objects in many cases, but it's been a long time since these pictures were recognizable) Thus, emojis do not resemble Egyptian hieroglyphs in my view - each emoji corresponds most closely to a word or concept, not a single letter https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Egyptian_hieroglyphs #emojis #linguistics #WorldEmojiDay

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