New iConji Language For the Symbol-Minded Texter

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.

3000BC called...

[fph il quozientatore]

3000BC called... they want their idea back!

There's this cool thing about letters

[lolbutts]

You don't need to have thousands of different glyphs available so that people can communicate. "Coffee at 4?" works fine for my uses (well, in a theoretical world where I drink coffee).

"It's that simple"

[ewrong]

She announces gleefully after spending nearly 2 minutes flicking through tabs and scrolling through mountains of icons to enter a message that would take most people a few seconds to type normally.

Dumbest idea I've seen in a long time.

Re:3000BC called...

[LunarEffect]

Because Egyptian hieroglyphics actually meant something to the Egyptian people. The symbols they used were in context with how they lived and what they saw around them and I suppose they were more self explanatory to the people back then than they are to us today. If you look at the iConji symbols, you'll see that you can understand the meaning of a lot of them just by looking at them, because they are based on symbols from our every day lives, thus making them easier for us to understand. I'm sure if you invented a time machine and gave these to an ancient Egyptian scientists without an explanation or context, they'd have a hard time understanding them.

Re:Not that I'd use it...

[MichaelSmith]

The problem with Esperanto is that it is European in focus, while iConji may appeal more to people in Asia.

destined to fail?

[ascari]

The successful "techno-social" languages seem to emerge spontaneously in response to real needs. (Think of things like twitter's @ syntax, the web's emoticons, IRC's one letter words, even 1337-speak etc.) The very fact that this language is the fruit of an "ambitious project" to meet a need merely postulated suggests that it's destined for a life in obscurity. Nobody will bother to learn it.

Re:3000BC called...

[cyp43r]

English incorporates foreign words for foreign or new concepts just like every other language. All languages grow and develop or they wouldn't have become languages.

Technologies for a dying problem

[Hurricane78]

What are they inventing this NOW for? It could have been useful back in 1992. But nowadays phones have full keyboards or touch screens, and the older methods (e.g. T9) die quickly.

But considering how they practically re-“invent” hieroglyphs, I will await their coming re-invention of another very old idea: The wheel!

Re:"It's that simple"

[dragonsomnolent]

And did anyone but me cringe every time she said "Conjisation"? Seriously, WTF?

Re:3000BC called...

[zaydana]

This post is remarkably narrow minded. Not all written languages in the world are made of symbols representing consonants and vowels, you know. In Japanese, for example, you use either Kanji (where a character has an associated meaning as well as multiple pronunciations), or kana (where each symbol is composed of a consonant as well as vowel, with a few exceptions). Or take Chinese, where each symbol has a single pronunciation, but also has a meaning attached. I'm not a linguist either by any means (I'm sure any of them reading this are getting rather agitated), but the way these sorts of languages work is beautiful - you can usually guess the meaning of a word you hear because you know the symbols associated with it and thus the meaning. You can't do that in scripts which are just composed of single consonants and vowels, especially when the pronunciation of them changes in every word (think English).