Talk:Emoji/Archives/2011/June

Are Emoji Japan-only

As far as I know emoji are a Japan-only phenomenon, so no, this article does not need to be "globalized" or have its title changed. Jpatokal (talk) 05:59, 17 November 2007 (UTC)

Not quite. If you read the Japanese version of wiki, it specifies these characters as a type of 'emoji' used by mobile phone service carriers. In the detailed segment, it described them as a form of OEM character set. OEM character sets have been around since vendor trying to extend ASCII, so it is an old concept in a new application. Who's to say that phone companies in other regions don't implement some kind of OEM charcter sets, just like how they convert the emoticons into icons? In fact, in the case of Windows Mobile, it may already have a mobile version of Marlett. Even if the application is localized, the underneath technology is not. Furthermore, the Japanese emoji wiki belong to another article that describes it as pictogram, so there is no point of throwing in foreign terms that only serve to obfuscate meanings, especially the 'emoji' title in the English wiki is a mistranslation. Jacob Poon 17:49, 19 November 2007 (UTC) —Preceding unsigned comment added by Jacob Poon (talk • contribs)

I work on telco, and I don't know of any countries outside Japan where phones come with built-in OEM character sets. Most of the world outside Japan uses the GSM charset, ISO 8859-1 (Latin1), ASCII, or local language codepages (formerly ISO 8859-X, these days usually Unicode), with no operator-specific customization. The Japanese article you cite also covers only Japanese operators, so I think the burden of proof is on you to demonstrate that emoji exist outside Japan.

Quite frankly, I don't really understand your argument. The encoding of emoji is a highly technical topic of interest only to the few of us working in this field, just like nobody outside IT gives a rat's ass about EUC-JP, Shift-JIS, etc. But "emoji" is a clear, agreed-upon and unambiguous name for it, so I don't see what is being obfuscated here. Jpatokal (talk) 03:06, 20 November 2007 (UTC)

And no, this should not be merged into emoticon, for the same reason that Wingdings or Unicode should not be merged there either. This is not about smileys, this is about a very specific set of encodings for those smileys. Jpatokal (talk) 14:00, 22 November 2007 (UTC)

Not a democracy here, but I think this topic should be mapped to emoticon. In many implementations the emoji are actually handled as single-character display options for emoticons, and there are also programs that map it back the other way, so that incoming emoji characters are mapped back to multi-character emoticons. What is the virtue of the Japanese "ji" 字 for character over the existing English icon?

Also, (based on my observations while living in Japan for 20 years) I think the Japanese coinage is partly based on "emotion" in English as well as "emoticon", but that it was mostly marketing considerations (and hype) that led to the promotion of emoji. (I think the Japanese proliferation is partly marketing, too, but also a kind of fashion thing.) It would make much more sense to treat this as a regional implementation subtopic within the emoticon article. Shanen (talk) 03:35, 21 June 2011 (UTC)