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摘要

Dear Wordsmith, Your question assumes that there is a clear boundary between written languages and images, which, I'm sorry to point out, isn't true. Many writing systems, including cuneiform and Mandarin Chinese, originated with pictograms. While it may be difficult at present to express complex ideas in emoji (excluding the successes of some enterprising artists who have, for example, translated Moby-Dick and the Bible into the vernacular), there's nothing to stop these Unicode symbols from evolving into a full-blown language. I could also point out, as many linguists have, that modern languages like French were dismissed as "artificial" in their early days, or that all the hand-wringing about textspeak, reactions, and GIFs echoes earlier anxieties that some new development-the printing press, writing itself-was going to I make humanity regress into a herd of gurgling simians. Even Nabokov, whose titanic vocabulary contained words such as pavonine (peacock-like), cal-lipygian (having beautiful buttocks), and logodaedaly (the arbitrary or capricious coining of words), once argued that English would benefit from a typographical symbol for the smile.