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Communications Handhelds

New iConji Language For the Symbol-Minded Texter 195

Posted by timothy
from the dissimilar-to-not-from dept.
billdar writes "As texting evolves into its own language, a Northern Colorado Business Review article covers an ambitious project to develop a new symbol-based language called iConji for mobile texting and online chatting. 'iConji is a set of user-created 32x32-pixel symbols that represent words or ideas, not dissimilar from ancient Egyptian hieroglyphics or American Sign Language.' There is an instructional video for the iPhone app and it is also integrated into Facebook." Behind this project is Kai Staats, formerly CEO of Terra Soft Solutions, the original developer of Yellow Dog Linux.
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New iConji Language For the Symbol-Minded Texter More

New iConji Language For the Symbol-Minded Texter

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  • If by "traditional Chinese characters" you mean the first writings made on oracle bones many thousands of years ago, then perhaps they can be called pictograms. However, the modern Chinese writing system is not pictographic or ideographic and Chinese characters, far from being some kind of abstract referents to things, is tightly bound to the structure of the Chinese language. See DeFrancis' classic work The Chinese Language: Fact and Fantasy [amazon.com] (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1984).

  • Re:them ancient egyptian hieroglyphics (Score:5, Informative)

    by suffe (72090) on Sunday May 23 2010, @06:43AM (#32312930) Homepage Journal
    Actually, they worked in three different ways. Pictograms, sounds and determinants.

    If you were in a "hurry", had a lack of space or artistic reasons, you could just draw the symbol for bird and be done with it.

    You could also use them to describe sounds (like a modern alphabet). This would combine a few symbols into a word that could be sounded-out.

    Lastly, you could use them to simply be more clear, to help _determine_ the meaning of a word. You'd spell out the word for bird and then draw a bird (and underline the bird to distinguish it from the rest).

    Interesting sideline to all of this is that you can write with hieroglyphs from both left to right and right to left. Doesn't really matter which one you pick. If you want to read it, just keep an eye out for the birds again. The direction of their mouths indicate which way to read the text.

  • Re:them ancient egyptian hieroglyphics (Score:3, Informative)

    by plut4rch (1553209) on Sunday May 23 2010, @06:44AM (#32312932)
    If you really want to be pedantic, it's not hieroglyphics but hieroglyphs. Also, the signs can be made to represent objects/ideas instead of sounds. If you want the hieroglyphic character to represent what it looks like, one just needs to add a small determinative stroke underneath. For example 'r' can be made to mean 'mouth' just be adding a small stroke underneath the mouth shaped sign.

  • Captain Blood called (Score:3, Informative)

    by Myoukochou (1817718) on Sunday May 23 2010, @06:54AM (#32312980)
    Captain Blood called, and he wants his UPCOM back. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Captain_Blood_(video_game) [wikipedia.org] This is an utterly terrible idea, however, as you can type way, way faster on, say, an iPhone than you could ever select symbols from a list. I mean, a bunch of custom smilies is what this is, and a bunch of them are commercial. This is highly likely not to take off. (Also, where’s the Android app?)

  • Re:3000BC called... (Score:4, Informative)

    by Speare (84249) on Sunday May 23 2010, @07:25AM (#32313058) Homepage Journal

    Just go back to 3000 BC...

    No we don't even need to go that far back... Here is a simpler idea... Chinese, Japanese anyone?

    The beginnings of Chinese characters are at least 8000 years ago, and they modernized over the millennia, so that is going that far back. Why do you think this project has the name "iConji" (pronounced the same as "i-kanji", the Japanese word that literally means "Chinese characters")?

  • hieroglyphics (Score:2, Informative)

    by paulatz (744216) on Sunday May 23 2010, @08:30AM (#32313320) Homepage

    the article (and its summary here on slashdot) states:

    symbols that represent words or ideas, not dissimilar from ancient Egyptian hieroglyphics

    unfortunately hieroglyphics compose a phonetic alphabet, not dissimilar from the roman or the cyrillic ones, with only a few ideograms for very common names. The idea that hieroglyphics are a graphical alphabet was very popular before the 1820s, when this writing started to be deciphered; archaeologists went as far as providing colourful "translations" from the graphical aspect of the signs.

  • Re:Not that I'd use it... (Score:3, Informative)

    by phoenix321 (734987) * on Sunday May 23 2010, @09:13AM (#32313564)

    1 billion people in Asia are perfectly capable of reading and writing "Chinese simplified".
    Then there's several million people in Macao, Singapore, Taiwan that can read and write "Chinese traditional"
    Another 130 million are perfectly capable of reading and writing Japanese symbols, which are "Chinese traditional" symbols plus one or two entire alphabets added.
    People capable of writing Simplified or Traditional characters don't lose their sleep when trying to read text of the other character set, it's not totally different after all.
    Most other Asian languages have grammar that looks slightly similar to Chinese and Japanese, with other symbols and alphabets of course.

    Why build and invent a rotten wheelbarrow when there's a fully equipped 21st-century luxury pick up already waiting at the tarmac that can be had for free?

    Most Asian phones have a full character set already, most Asian people are capable of understanding all of them, most Asian networks are capable of transmitting the messages.

    Every PowerPoint slide written to defend the idea of reinventing Kanji/Hanzi type languages is a crime against mental sanity.

  • What you are seeing are vestiges of characters being designed to look similar to the objects denoted by the Chinese words referring to them, but the writing system as a whole cannot be called pictographic or ideographic. DeFrancis was one of the most respected scholars of Chinese in the West, and immediately dismissing his work as "bullshit" just makes you look foolish. Merely learning Japanese doesn't make you an expert on writing systems. In any event, there are plenty of other sources out there who would tell you the same, such as The World's Writing Systems [amazon.com] by ed. Daniels and Bright (Oxford University Press, 1996), the standard reference on writing systems in general, where we find the following:

    No character ever stood for an "idea" independent of a word. Chinese characters stood, and continue to stand, for words, and only by extension for the ideas they convey.

Don't get to bragging.