Abstract Emoji

William Overington

Friday 18 November 2016

On Monday 24 October 2016 I published the following document.

Some designs for emoji of personal pronouns

Some_designs_for_emoji_of_personal_pronouns.pdf A PDF document of size 18.52 kilobytes.

Friday 18 November 2016

Some designs for emoji grammatical operators

Here are some designs that I have produced for emoji grammatical operators. The concept is that the emoji grammatical operator operates on the emoji character that follows it, so as to provide a grammatical context for the emoji character.

Each of the characters is designed to be on a 7 by 7 grid, and is one contiguous piece with no inner hole.
Each of the images in this web page is presented as a 72 pixel by 72 pixel 32-bit png graphic file, each pixel of the 7 by 7 grid being 10 pixels by 10 pixels. The 70 pixel by 70 pixel image is centred within and upon a 72 pixel by 72 pixel transparent square.

Lines are always one unit wide and only corners and T junctions are allowed.

The character emoji grammatical operator verb present tense means that the emoji character immediately following the emoji grammatical operator character is to be regarded as a verb and that that verb is to be regarded as in the present tense.

All emoji grammatical operator verb characters are in a colour that I call verb green (r, g, b) = (64, 128, 0).

The character emoji grammatical operator noun subject means that the emoji character immediately following the emoji grammatical operator character is to be regarded as a noun and that that noun is to be regarded as the subject of a sentence.

The character emoji grammatical operator noun direct object means that the emoji character immediately following the emoji grammatical operator character is to be regarded as a noun and that that noun is to be regarded as the direct object of a sentence.

Other characters that are named starting with emoji grammatical operator noun have a meaning that the emoji character immediately following the emoji grammatical operator character is to be regarded as a noun and that the final part of the name of the character indicates a preposition that is applied to that noun.

For example, emoji grammatical operator noun to means that the emoji immediately following the emoji grammatical operator character is to be regarded as a noun and that that noun is to be regarded as a noun preceeded by the word to.

For example, emoji grammatical operator noun with means that the emoji immediately following the emoji grammatical operator character is to be regarded as a noun and that that noun is to be regarded as a noun preceeded by the word with.

Thus that noun could, depending upon the natural language in which it being read, have a particular grammatical case though that case is not specified in the emoji grammatical operator character.

All emoji grammatical operator noun characters are in a colour that I call noun brown (r, g, b) = (128, 64, 0).

emoji grammatical operator verb present tense

emoji grammatical operator verb future tense

emoji grammatical operator verb past tense

emoji grammatical operator verb pluperfect tense

emoji grammatical operator noun subject

emoji grammatical operator noun direct object

emoji grammatical operator noun to

emoji grammatical operator noun for

emoji grammatical operator noun of

emoji grammatical operator noun by

emoji grammatical operator noun with

emoji grammatical operator noun from

emoji grammatical operator noun notwithstanding

emoji grammatical operator noun on

emoji grammatical operator noun under

Saturday 19 November 2016

emoji grammatical operator adverb

emoji grammatical operator adjective

The emoji grammatical operator adverb character is in a colour that I call adverb cyan (r, g, b) = (0, 128, 96).

The emoji grammatical operator adjective character is in a colour that I call adjective purple (r, g, b) = (128, 16, 64).

Saturday 19 November 2016

emoji grammatical operator verb infinitive

emoji grammatical operator verb must infinitive

Monday 21 November 2016

On Monday 24 October 2016 I published the following document.

Some designs for emoji of personal pronouns

Some_designs_for_emoji_of_personal_pronouns.pdf A PDF document of size 18.52 kilobytes.

In that document the designs display correctly, yet were produced as 70 pixels by 70 pixels and do not feature transparency.

The following designs are each presented as a 72 pixel by 72 pixel 32-bit png graphic file, each pixel of the 7 by 7 grid being 10 pixels by 10 pixels. The 70 pixel by 70 pixel image is centred within and upon a 72 pixel by 72 pixel transparent square.

Lines are always one unit wide and only corners and T junctions are allowed.

In addition, each design is such that if mirrored horizontally that the direction is clear, and each design is such that if displayed in monochrome then it is still distinct from every other design in the collection of designs.

Also, each design is such that its meaning does not depend on the length of lines, so that if a design is drawn quickly with a pen on paper then which design it is can be decided from the way that lines are connected.

I had posted in the Unicode mailing list the following post.

http://www.unicode.org/mail-arch/unicode-ml/y2016-m11/0115.html

I had started to produce the 72 pixel by 72 pixel with transparency designs when the following post arrived in the Unicode mailing list.

http://www.unicode.org/mail-arch/unicode-ml/y2016-m11/0119.html

I replied to that post.

http://www.unicode.org/mail-arch/unicode-ml/y2016-m11/0133.html

As a result of that post I studied some more and have added some more designs.

I have added some more designs for personal pronouns. I have added designs for "two" and also designs for "three or more".

I have also added some designs so as to give the option of expressing "we" either basically or with specifying one or other of "inclusive we" or "exclusive we".

I have also added a design for the form of you that is expressed by the word "tu" of French.

That makes a total of thirty-one designs for personal pronouns at the moment.

I have enjoyed the process of designing the glyphs so as include the information in the designs while keeping the designs distinct each from the others.

emoji personal pronoun I

emoji personal pronoun we

emoji personal pronoun we two

emoji personal pronoun we three or more

emoji personal pronoun we inclusive

emoji personal pronoun we exclusive

emoji personal pronoun we two inclusive

emoji personal pronoun we two exclusive

emoji personal pronoun we three or more inclusive

emoji personal pronoun we three or more exclusive

emoji personal pronoun you

emoji personal pronoun you plural

emoji personal pronoun you two

emoji personal pronoun you three or more

emoji personal pronoun tu

emoji personal pronoun it

emoji personal pronoun he

emoji personal pronoun she

emoji personal pronoun one

emoji personal pronoun they

emoji personal pronoun they male

emoji personal pronoun they female

emoji personal pronoun they male and female

emoji personal pronoun they two

emoji personal pronoun they two male

emoji personal pronoun they two female

emoji personal pronoun they two male and female

emoji personal pronoun they three or more

emoji personal pronoun they three or more male

emoji personal pronoun they three or more female

emoji personal pronoun they three or more male and female

Tuesday 22 November 2016

Yesterday I referred to a post that I made in the Unicode mailing list.

http://www.unicode.org/mail-arch/unicode-ml/y2016-m11/0133.html

There is something that I wrote in that post that I would like to repeat in this web page.

I was referring to the emoji grammatical operator noun items and wrote the following sentence.

I designed the glyphs with both the Latin case system, and also the way that Esperanto uses a subject, an inflected version of the subject for direct object, and a preposition followed by the same form as used for the subject for all other grammatical cases, in mind.

Tuesday 22 November 2016

Yesterday in a post in the Unicode mailing list some ideas for emoji were suggested.

As a result I am trying to design some glyphs in order to convey the following emoji that were suggested in that post.

The suggestions, expressed here in my own wording, are as follows.

A design for an emoji that means ", speaking for myself," and a design for an emoji that means ", speaking on behalf of ...".

Pairs of emoji to distinguish the following pairs of word.

near far

this that

here there

left right

front back

I have added the following pair.

up down

I liked these ideas so I thought about them and wondered how I could design emoji to represent them. I decided to have a set of six emoji to represent the following.

left right up down near far

I had not previously considered the word pair of near far in this context and I am grateful for the suggestion.

I remembered the way that a two-dimensional drawing can be used to represent a three dimensional cube.

So I decided to use the diagonal from lower left to upper right to represent the near-far axis qualitatively.

Previously I wrote as follows.

The emoji grammatical operator adverb character is in a colour that I call adverb cyan (r, g, b) = (0, 128, 96).

The emoji grammatical operator adjective character is in a colour that I call adjective purple (r, g, b) = (128, 16, 64).

For the colour of the indicative item in the designs of these six emoji I averaged the colours adverb cyan and adjective purple, because near and far can sometimes be adverbs and sometimes adjectives. I do not intend that as an exact linguistic analysis of the choice of colour. I simply wanted a colour that is neither adverb cyan nor adjective purple so I tried averaging them and got a colour that seems suitable for the purpose.

I call the colour indicative indigo (r, g, b) = (64, 72, 80).

I used a non-symmetrical shape as the indicative item so that if these emoji become implemented and were then used with right to left text it would be clear as to whether mirroring of a glyph had taken place.

Here are my designs.

emoji left

emoji right

emoji up

emoji down

emoji near

emoji far

For this and that I continued with the idea to use the diagonal from lower left to upper right to represent the near-far axis qualitatively.

Here are my designs.

emoji this

emoji that

Wednesday 23 November 2016

Some readers may have noticed that the horizontal green bar in the top half of each of the emoji personal prononun glyphs that have male and female in the name of the item is not located in the same place as the horizontal green bar in the top half of the glyph for he and the glyphs that have male and not female in the name of the item.

There is a reason for that. If I had the horizontal green bar for male in the glyphs for male and female in the original place used for male in the glyph for he, then in monochrome the glyph would have an unfilled square in the top left corner which could possibly cause confusion with the glyph of emoji personal pronoun I.

If however the horizontal green bar for male were always in the middle it would not be attached to the blue square in some of the other glyphs, such as the glyph for he.

So I had to make that adaption. It is unfortunate but I felt it better to move the horizontal green bar to the right for each of the male and female glyphs rather than have the possibility of confusion with the glyph of emoji personal pronoun I. if a monochrome display were in use.

Thursday 24 November 2016

Yesterday the following post appeared in the Unicode mailing list.

http://www.unicode.org/mail-arch/unicode-ml/y2016-m11/0168.html

On Saturday 19 November 2016 I published in this web page a design for emoji grammatical operator adjective.

The idea is that placing that emoji grammatical operator character before an emoji picture character would produce in the mind of the reader the idea of an adjective derived from the picture.

After reading the post referenced above I decided to try to produce designs for stand-alone abstract emoji characters that could be used after a noun so as to give an indication of size.

I thought of the designs while away from the computer and this morning I have produced the designs as graphic files on the computer using the Serif PagePlus X7 desktop publishing program.

I started with a copy of the emoji grammatical operator adjective character and started a new series of abstract emoji characters that are not operators. I used the same colour as for the emoji grammatical operator adjective character, a colour that I call adjective purple. In the copy, I began by changing the design at the left side so as to produce a left-side design specific to this series of adjectives. The change was by adding a short vertical pale at the top left corner. This design was then used as the starting design for this series of emoji.

In the event I decided later to use the design as emoji medium size.

I then produced the following images.

emoji huge

emoji large

emoji small

emoji tiny

I imagine that in use one of these emoji would be used after the noun that it qualifies. This is in the same way that an adjective follows a noun in French rather than the way that an adjective precedes a noun in English.

This would mean that either the image of the emoji noun, in this case a picture of a manatee, could be displayed followed by a display of the image for the emoji adjective; or alternatively an automated system could choose one of five glyphs of a manatee and then that glyph could be displayed yet the glyph of the adjective would not be displayed.

Friday 25 November 2016

The mention of front and back recently started me thinking.

What if in a future system an incoming message contained a model of a three-dimensional object and the screen of the system displays a two-dimensional view of that object. How could front and back views of the three-dimensional object be selected? How could views from the left, from the right, from above and maybe from below be selected? How could a view from a chosen oblique angle be chosen? Could zoom-in and zoom-out be used?

Could all of these features be controlled from a simple sixteen item input system as found on some mobile devices? The sixteen items being zero through to nine, star, octothorpe and four directions, up, down, left and right.

I have thought about this and have thought of a solution that is highly flexible.

Suppose that there are sixteen special purpose emoji, one for each of zero through to nine, star, octothorpe, up, down, left and right.

Suppose that any one or more of those special purpose emoji can be included in a message and that when received by the system that an entry is made in a software object within the system, that entry being of the character next after the special purpose emoji, or the sequence of characters after the special purpose emoji if the first character received after the special purpose emoji is an emoji action begin character, the sequence being until an emoji action end character arrives, both the emoji action begin character and the emoji action end character being stored as part of the sequence.

If that first character is an action emoji, such as emoji action view from back, then the system would work such that if the end user presses a key on the device being used then the action would take place.

As each of the special purpose emoji and the action emoji would have a visible glyph, then there would be a screen display showing what each effect each particular key press would produce in that particular context.

The action could be a sequence of characters if, for example, one were producing a videotext type display in which the sequence of characters could be a page number in the videotext system. For such a videotext system there could be a special purpose emoji that combines both the emoji action begin character and the emoji action character into one emoji character.

The action would only take place if the appropriate key were pressed by the end user. The action would not take place simply because the character were loaded into the system.

A collection of action emoji could be encoded and the future system would be designed so as to act upon those action emoji.

Here are my designs.

emoji action begin

emoji action end

emoji action display page

For the videotext system the name of the page to become displayed in response to a specified key press would be expressed using ordinary characters placed after an emoji action display page character and before an emoji action end character. The specification of which particular key press would cause that page to become displayed would be achieved by placing the special purpose emoji character related to that particular key immediately before the emoji action display page character.

Saturday 26 November 2016

Yesterday I wrote the following sentence.

Suppose that there are sixteen special purpose emoji, one for each of zero through to nine, star, octothorpe, up, down, left and right.

I have decided to name those sixteen emoji in a series with each name starting with emoji label from key followed by a word that indicates the name of the key.

Thus, for example, emoji label from key nine.

Here are some designs.

emoji label from key zero

emoji label from key one

emoji label from key two

emoji label from key three

emoji label from key four

emoji label from key five

emoji label from key six

emoji label from key seven

emoji label from key eight

emoji label from key nine

emoji label from key star

emoji label from key octothorpe

emoji label from key left

emoji label from key right

emoji label from key up

emoji label from key down

Here are some designs for action emoji to cause the viewing of a three-dimensional model of an object from some specific directions.

The word action in the name of the character is to indicate that the rest of the name is something which is to be done. This is helpful because it distinguishes an action emoji from an emoji that just states an existing position.

For example, in English, the text view from the left could mean either view from the left as in please view from the left or it could mean view from the left as in this is the view from the left. I have considered putting the word please in each of the names of the action emoji but I decided against doing so because had I done so the name of the emoji character could possibly then have caused confusion as possibly being regarded as representing a request to the end user of the system rather than to the display system.

These designs are adapted from the designs for left, right, up, down, near and far that were published on Tuesday 22 November 2016 in these research notes.

I have included in these designs a square that is to represent the object that is being viewed. The indicative item of the earlier designs indicates the place from where the object is to be viewed, the idea being that the object is located at and near the origin of the coordinate axes of the three-dimensional space in which it is located.

emoji action view from the left