Transcribing a fictional pictograph based language

Question

I'm a fresh pup to this site and I have a bit of a quagmire at my fingertips. My novel takes place in a dystopian future approximately half a century from the modern day. Consumerism and promotional branding have subverted the way people fundamentally think and speak. The ability to read and write in modern English has become relatively rare and useless. While people still communicate through spoken word - particularly the elderly - the youth communicate almost entirely by instant message Emojis, even in face to face discussion.

Ideally, I would like the reader to become fluent in this very basic language with limited meanings as the novel progresses somewhat in the same vein as 1984's Newspeak and A Clockwork Orange's slang. I would like this dialogue to be communicated to the reader through Emojis with a crude translation included. I am considering stylizing the dialogue as such, but I would love to get some feedback on a more streamlined method of doing so; do you know of a simple but appropriate program to use Emojis in a word document (Microsoft 10), or do you think this idea is fated to cause hysteria?

The Emojiite language for example would consist of the pictographs of: A man running, a party hat, a beer, an alarm flashing. (This would be followed by the translation for the reader: Hurry. Party. Get drunk. Now.)

Your input is greatly appreciated.

Answer 1

This might help point you to a model you could use, or it might put you off the whole idea.

Apparently Herman Melville's classic Moby Dick was translated into emojis as a Kickstarter project. There is a pdf of Emoji Dick here and a web page explaining the project here.

Most of the comments to the post on the Language Log blog, where I first read about this, say that the conceit quickly becomes tiresome, but someone does concede that "here and there, one can find a flash of brilliance."

On the pdf, scroll down past various title pages and so on to page 15 to see the start of the actual text. Sentences of English and allegedly equivalent emojis are interspersed. Knowing only six emoticons myself I am unable to comment on the literary qualities of the text in emoji language but from a purely visual examination it seems as if something might be lost in translation.

And that is going to be the problem, I think. Your story is about people's thought and language becoming limited, which is a very powerful theme, but it is very difficult to make a story some or all of which is told through the medium of a deliberately impoverished language into an enriching experience itself. George Orwell's 1984 relegated the description and examples of Newspeak to an appendix for that reason. It's fascinating, but it is not part of the story.

That said, if you can pull it off it could be awesome.

Answer 2

Neal Stephenson's book Anathem is set in a world where the writing system of the people who live outside the main character's monastery is something like you describe. I think the only reason that it worked so well was that the main character didn't understand it and Stephenson never tried to make the reader learn it.

This sounds like something dangerously like dialect, which just isn't a good idea to include in your work. If you wrote a book that had Chinese people in it, and all of them spoke using Chinese characters, then you'd alienate all of your English speaking readers that couldn't read Chinese... that's most of them probably. And here, you're proposing to write dialogue in a language that none of your readers will understand. Sounds like a bad idea to me.

Have you ever tried to read the original Uncle Remus stories about Br'er Rabbit? They're written in a phonetic transcription of a dialect, and are just about impossible to read. Try it and see what you think. Then decide if writing your book in the dialect your characters are using is a good idea.