[Ann Drysdale]

Roger, I can't do that because I can't spell it.

Did you try the quiz attached to the original link? Apparently these things have exact names and they were testing to see if one knew the "correct" name for them.

The rightness or wrongness of these names seems to depend upon a consensus of some kind, but among whom?

And if the names are important enough to be recorded so exactly, why do we need the ugly pokemonical conundrums in the first place?

[Pedro Poitevin]

I'm with Orwn: linguistics is a descriptive science, and as soon as a linguistic device of any kind begins to have interesting properties related to its usage, then it is worthy of study. There are, of course, two ways about doing this: one way is to declare these devices to be words (or morphemes, or what have you) and then study what kind of words are they, and another way is to declare them not to be words, and spend your time explaining why they ought not to be regarded as words. The latter seems significantly more prescriptive than the former, and if you want to spend your energy as scholar and a scientist productively, then you naturally prefer to go the first route.

I do think the observations other people have made in this thread are important, and I would add that a linguist studying these objects probably is interested in these questions: can an emoji be used as an adverb? (I've seen them verbed, yikes!) Etc. The phonological question is very eloquent: I think of words as susceptible of being uttered, but my brother is deaf and though he speaks Spanish beautifully and can read lips exceedingly well, sign language, his first language, has words that do not contain letters and do not have utterances associated to them. True, some signs correspond to words in a spoken language, but it is amazing, when you study the linguistic phenomenon of signing, how much syntactic-like nuance of expression occurs in the way signs flow, and it's not inconceivable that—because signs and the words commonly associated with them do not get used in quite the same way—the sign for a particular word is—as a word—not quite the same linguistic object as the word that we associate with it.

Now, ask me if I ever use these things or care for these emoji, and that's a completely different matter...

Pedro.

[Orwn Acra]

Originally Posted by Brian Allgar

Orwn, you are still avoiding the excellent point raised by Peter and Roger: a word within a language is something that can be pronounced and written down.

And to say that "If enough people consider emojis as words, then emojis are words" seems to me frankly absurd. If enough people consider cows to be cabbages, does that make meat-eaters vegetarians?

Brian, I speak only of language and what we call each object in the world. Biologically, a cabbage remains a cabbage even if we call it a cow, but there is no reason we cannot call a cabbage a cow since the link between signifier and signified is mostly arbitrary. I am saussure you understand this that it does not need further explaining.

I do not define a word as being something written down or pronounced because this leaves out hundreds of sign languages which are as legitimate, recursive, and human as uttered languages. It seems that the definition of word should be universal to all human languages, not just spoken ones or English, and so I reject Peter and Roger's definition.

[Orwn Acra]

The irony is that I never use emojis because they are kind of dumb. And like Annie, I don't even know what most of them mean (the eggplant emoji a notable exception). I think it's fine if they are considered words, however.

[Roger Slater]

But does the Oxford dictionary include sign language?

[Julie Steiner]

Originally Posted by Orwn Acra

The irony is that I never use emojis because they are kind of dumb.

There's even more irony in that choice of pejorative, in this context. Ahem.

But I do share your basic position: I don't like emoji, and don't think that the standard definition of "word" encompasses them...but I'm also not convinced that "word" and "written word" are as synonymous as Roger is arguing. Especially since words have been around a lot longer than writing has, and not all writing systems are alphanumeric.

I think of emoji as symbols. We replace symbols like @ and % with words such as "at" (or "each") and "percent", but we don't think of them as words themselves.

It's understood that symbols are mere representations of an object or concept. But aren't words also mere representations of an object or concept? The word "pipe", or even a picture of a pipe, is not a pipe.



So, what is our definition of "word," if we don't like the way that the Oxford Dictionaries folks are trying to redefine it?

[Digression: I'm reminded of the fuss over two Latin translations of the Greek of John 1:1--Jerome's "In principio erat Verbum" vs. Erasmus's "In principio erat Sermo" for "Ἐν ἀρχῇ ἦν ὁ λόγος". In ancient Greek, λόγος (logos) very rarely refers to a single word in a sentence. There are other terms for that sort of grammatical usage: ἔπος (epos), λέξις (lexis), ὄνομα (onoma), ῥῆμα (rhēma). Here's the full text of an article on the subject, if anyone's interested in my little tangent.]

[Peter Chipman]

Originally Posted by Orwn Acra

I do not define a word as being something written down or pronounced

Neither do I. In my post, I explicitly acknowledged that an emoji can be a word. What I'm trying to argue is that it isn't an English word.

because this leaves out hundreds of sign languages which are as legitimate, recursive, and human as uttered languages.

Yes. I specifically mentioned sign languages as an example of languages not based on speech.

It seems that the definition of word should be universal to all human languages, not just spoken ones or English, and so I reject Peter and Roger's definition.

I have no idea whether Roger and I are in complete agreement or not as to the definition of "word." I don't believe I've given, or even hinted at, such a definition in my post on this thread. I do have definite notions as to what some of the features of an English word need to be.

-Peter

[Ann Drysdale]

In trying to invest these pictorial puzzles with wordliness, I am reading these posts carefully and have noticed that there is a difference of opinion, demonstrated in practice, on the formation of the plural. The O.D. merely shrugs - "suit yourselves" - and I am a little ashamed of my nerdy need to know.

It feels to me like an East/West linguistic decision. Do we add an "s" to make a comfortable, recognisable generally-accepted plural, or respect the syntactical conventions of their origins and depend on the context in which the word-or-not is placed within the sentence?

To use a poetic parallel, are these things sonnets or haiku?

[Brian Allgar]

Orwn, we can certainly agree that sign languages are languages, but are they composed of words in any useful sense of the term? Words are one way of representing and referring to objects, concepts, etc. Signs, including what I always thought were called 'emoticons', are another way, and it doesn't seem to me useful to conflate the two. A further distinction is that, as we know, the words are not the objects themselves * - 'pipe' is not a pipe - whereas 'emothingies' are the actual objects, even though their purpose is to represent a concept or state of mind.

* Perhaps the only word that is indeed the thing itself is 'word'.

[Brian Allgar]

Originally Posted by Roger Slater

Even if you're in love with emojis, they're not words. The first clue I had was there are no letters of the alphabet involved.

Bob, I stand in awe of your almost Holmesian powers of deduction.