Sunday, May 23, 2010

iConji: New language developed for cellphone/social networking




This is their webpage.

iConji is new. It isnt even on wikipedia yet. Details are scarce but this appears to be a new language specifically developed for cellphone texters and social networking junkies. Unlike most current languages, iConji is more like ancient egyptian hieroglyphics or ancient chinese. Its a pictorial language using pictographs. There are > 1000 32x32 pictographs or icons unlike most languages which have one symbol per phoneme or sound.Each icon represents an object or idea.

This appears to have been designed to be cellphone friendly, in this case, an iphone which uses a touch screen and your fingers as the writing device. You can make a message with only a few icons so its much faster. Another advantage is that it is language agnostic, i.e. you can easily communicate with people who speak different languages + its easier for machine translation.


Safety signs and traffic signs serve the same purpose.  They are also pictograms and they can be understood by people who speak different languages.

Personally I doubt this will catch on except if it is fully automated. As the chinese alphabet shows, you need a heck of a large number of icons to represent all possible ideas and words in daily life.

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