Are Emojis the Modern-Day Hieroglyph?
Emojis have been on the rise since their creation.
They started out as a fun way to express simple emotions by repurposing punctuation marks or letters like :) or ;-p but they have evolved into an internationally recognized system of thousands. As of September 2023, Unicode Standard has registered 3,782 of them, and with updates at regular intervals, there is no doubt this list will expand to be much larger. The consensus is clear: emojis are useful. But, how are they used?
Take a look at the following emoji combination:
🤟😔
Does this convey specific meaning(s)? Most of us would probably say, “sort of.” I mean, they are just pictures. If we were to give each a name, maybe it would be something like “rock on” and “disappointment.” We can read the emotions or situations that the images are typically associated with, but, on their own or as a pair, they are too ambiguous to make any concrete meaning of. Note how the same combination can be found in wildly different circumstances.
I have a ten hour shift and I got three hours of sleep last night 🤟😔
I still can’t believe Mick Jagger died 🤟😔
The events in (1) and (2) are hardly related, but the emotions behind them are. Both of these statements are expressing sadness while also indexing resiliency. Both of these sentences communicate feelings along the lines of, “this makes me sad, but life goes on” or “this sucks, but I’ll get through it.”
Some emojis are very specific and will be found in rather rigid linguistic environments; I’ve never seen somebody use the flag of Cambodia metaphorically. But, other emojis can be found in a wide range of environments, alongside words and other emojis alike.
Now consider this combo:
😡 🔪 😧 ➡️ 😵
We don’t know who these people are, but there is definitely more of a story here. It’s not a literal story. I doubt anybody’s first thought would be “A mad guy, a giant knife, and a scared guy go visit a dead guy.” But there is something resembling a plot.
We have more information from this combination in that there are five emojis as opposed to two. Additionally, the types of emojis feel different in their functions. We have emojis which imply action; the knife seems to be used on somebody and we can recognize ‘the mad guy’ as the holder of the knife and ‘the scared guy’ as the one being stabbed. We can also recognize that the arrow implies some sort of transition, in this case, someone being killed.
If I were to task you to break this violent statement into its parts (nouns, verbs, prepositions, etc.), you might say that the knife functions like a verb and the arrow like a preposition. But, how is this possible? They aren’t words, they’re just pictures.
In order to explore this phenomenon, I want to compare emojis to the oldest form of picture-language: Egyptian hieroglyphics.
What are hieroglyphics?
I studied one semester of Middle Egyptian when I was in college. I would be sitting there in the campus library trying to figure out how to draw a mini-owl or a non-descript animal intestine and, while it was exceedingly challenging, it was some of the most fun I’ve ever had with language-learning. It taught me one thing above all others: hieroglyphics are confusing but they can be incredibly descriptive.
When you look at the following sentence, what do you see?
(This is an example from James Hoch’s 1997 textbook, Middle Egyptian Grammar)There’s a couple little birds, something like a bowl, an owl, maybe a brick, a sideways face, a pair of arms, a man with something on his head, a big bird, some squiggles, all those half circles? At first glance (and perhaps second or third), there isn’t a story here. Let's do what we did above and break this sentence into its parts.
Unlike English, adjectives in Egyptian come after nouns, so if we account for this and put it all together, we get:
“The King of Egypt is in a state of joy because of this great construction project.”
Now we know what it means and how to translate it into English, but what does it sound like in Egyptian? Unlike emojis which have loose meanings and can be interpreted differently among readers, these pictures have definitive meanings with pronunciations which were agreed upon by the scribes who created them.
Before we get to that, let’s learn about how hieroglyphs are categorized.
The Four Types of Hieroglyphs
There are four categories that hieroglyphs are generally put into: alphabetics, syllabics, word-signs, and determinatives. We’ll go through the qualities of each and assign the signs above.
Alphabetic signs are those that depict a single sound.
This is the smallest group of hieroglyphs. It’s the one that is shown to you if you look up, “How to spell my name in Ancient Egyptian.”
In the table above, it shows the typical transliterations used by Egyptologists, but some of them will look unfamiliar to you. The sign for the vulture looks like a 3, it is a vowel sound similar to the letter a in cat. The arm glyph is transliterated with a small, raised c, and it was likely pronounced as a glottal-sound, a sound similar to the “pause” in the middle of uh-oh. The pool glyph is pronounced like the sh in show. There are four different h-glyphs which stand for sounds we don’t really ever use in English. This can make reading hieroglyphs feel a bit clunky.
Since there were no microphones or recording devices in the times of the pharaohs, we sort of have to make some educated guesses about what the sounds sound like. This is partly done by comparing it to other related languages spoken today and by using preserved pieces of history like the Rosetta Stone.
They are the most common hieroglyphs and a lot of them are used in the statement about the King. If we highlight all of the alphabetic hieroglyphs, you can see it’s more than half.
Syllabic signs are symbols that stand for two or three (or rarely four) sounds.
Writing out every letter can be time consuming so syllabics originated as a way to save space and time. These signs usually mean something on their own, but they are repurposed for new words with the same pronunciation.
For example, the pair of arms glyph has a meaning on its own, “spirit.” And it has its own pronunciation, k3. In our statement about the King, it is joined with the loaf glyph, t, to create the word for “construction project,” k3t. It loses its original meaning, instead becoming a representative of that word’s sounds. There are hundreds of these syllabic glyphs, I’ve highlighted the ones below in blue.
A quirk of Egyptian hieroglyphs is that they can sometimes be redundant. As much as saving space with syllabic glyphs can be important for longer statements, sometimes shorter ones are spelled out with syllabic and alphabetic symbols alongside one another. Looking at the final-word, the adjective meaning ‘great’ which is composed of the last five glyphs, we see a bi-consonantal syllabic and three alphabetics. But, this word is not five sounds, it is only three. This is because, while what is written out is c3 c3 t, only one of the repeated /c3/sounds is actually pronounced. Redundancy exists for several reasons in Ancient Egyptian, and while it can sometimes make things confusing, it can also act as a form of reassurance.
Word-signs represent the glyphs in a literal sense.
When indicating the word “spirit,” the pair of arms would belong to this category. For the most part, outside of compound-constructions, you will see a word-sign accompanied by a vertical dash. In our example sentence, we have two word-signs, one meaning “because of,” and the other meaning “king.” The word meaning “king” is not followed by a dash because it is joined to a compound-noun (King of Egypt). I’ve highlighted the word-signs in yellow.
Believe it or not, that’s enough information to pronounce the sentence in full. Take a look at the pronunciations, color-coded to match the glyph that depicts them.
The way I’d pronounce this is, “You neb tahwee em rehshoot her kat ten ‘at.”
I can already hear your question. Why do we still have hieroglyphs leftover? The last category is, in my opinion, the most interesting. And it’s silent.
The Determinative
The glyphs highlighted below in purple are called determinatives. They are not associated with sounds, instead, they depict concepts which help determine the meaning of the word they appear alongside.
Like the overwhelming majority of languages, Ancient Egyptian had homophones, words that mean different things but sound the same. English is full of them and, while we often play around with spelling to differentiate these words (ladder vs latter), they can also cause ambiguity which leads to the potential for misunderstanding. Left can mean a direction or it can mean something that’s been departed from.
As the alphabetic table showed, there aren’t many glyphs for vowels. This is because the majority of them were not indicated in writing. Vowels were definitely present when these words were being spoken, they just are not written down for one reason or another. This might seem strange to English-speakers, but alphabets that don’t indicate vowels are actually fairly common. They are called abjads; Arabic is the largest language system that makes use of one.
In order to understand the meaning of the word, the determinative acts as the biggest hint. If we were in Ancient Egypt or in an age closer to it, this would also likely cue us into which vowel sounds would be present. Sadly this knowledge has been lost with time and we are left mainly with the sounds of consonants and some semi-vowels. This is why it is commonplace to put a placeholder-e in between consonants when sounding out words. Nb is pronounced “neb;” tn is “ten;” ḥr is “her.”
Let’s look at an example of how a determinative aids us in deciphering meaning.
This is a biconsonantal (syllabic) that carries the reading of mḥ and a pronunciation of “meh.” It depicts a type of whip that was common in Ancient Egypt. We can see it on its own and in this case it would indicate a unit of measurement, but it can also join with determinatives to create new glyphs. The following two words are pronounced the same as the one above: “meh.”
The only thing that makes them distinct is the glyph at the bottom, so let’s look at them a bit closer and see what they are trying to tell us.
Determinatives are not always the most clear. They loosely categorize signs into groups of similar qualities, but it is not always easy to decipher meaning just by knowing what the individual glyphs themselves depict.
Neither of these ideas have anything to do with a whip, the original meaning of the top-glyph. But you may be able to see how “seizing” something is an act of strength which uses the arm and how “filling” something is an abstract idea.
Returning to the final pieces of our example about the King, we can see the papyrus scroll (this time in a vertical position) after the word for “great” and those for “a state of joy.” Both of these concepts are abstract and difficult to think about visually, so it makes sense that this determinative would be present. Let’s take a look at the remaining two.
Some determinatives are a bit redundant, but often their deletion will cause confusion. If the determinative with the man carrying the bowl on his head was left out, “this great construction project” could also mean “her great spirit,” which is a very different idea.
And with that, you’ve successfully translated a sentence from hieroglyphs to English!
Now, let’s get back to our other half of this case study: emojis.
What are emojis anyway?
Emojis are pictures which have been encoded into text. They are little icons that we are all familiar with, some of us even use them daily.
Their roots are found in the emoticons. These are small pictures which are formed from existent language-characters, the most famous of which being the smiley face. They have existed for centuries all over the world.
In the late 90s, emojis were created in Japan as a fun way to decorate text, but also as a way to communicate more accurately in a smaller amount of space. They were introduced to the wider world in the 2000s and by the 2010s, they could be found on every smartphone on Earth.
From the beginning, it seems that emojis have served a variety of purposes. But, aside from being a recognizable picture, are they anything like hieroglyphics? In some ways they really are, in others not so much.
Similarities between Hieroglyphs and Emojis
One of the clearest ways that emojis are used similarly to hieroglyphs is when they are used as replacements for words. This is a process that gives the emoji a function very similar to hieroglyphic word-signs, such as neb “king” above, being depicted as its own sign. If someone texts you the following, I’m willing to bet you’d understand what they mean.
🌭 ⁄ 🍔 4️⃣ 🍽❓
For emojis like this with literal meanings, we can essentially use them interchangeably with the word that describes them. In other words, when we use a “hot dog” emoji, we know that its meaning is “hot dog.”
People do this in all sorts of ways that allows them to communicate in a concise way. I often see people posting American flag emojis 🇺🇸on the 4th of July, indexing their allegiance to America without actually saying its name. In a way, a country’s flag functions as a synonym to its name. Even a cultural symbol can be a stand-in for a country; the watermelon emoji 🍉 is commonly used on social media to index solidarity with Palestinian people and their suffering.
Emojis acting as synonyms for nouns is a very productive process and it really is not that different from word-signs in Ancient Egyptian. The main problem here is that different people have different associations with emojis. The eggplant emoji 🍆has been used as a euphemism for sex for more than a decade, but to others, it might just be part of a grocery list.
The primary similarity among emojis and hieroglyphics is the way that they can be used to add semantic and pragmatic information. This brings us back to the determinative. The whole point of the determinative is to give us some information about how the statement should be understood, and emojis often function in a similar way. While we can use emojis like word-signs and completely replace the words that match their meaning, we can also use them alongside those words. The sentences below are the same in words, but different in emojis. Think of it as a response to, “Do you mind if we get pizza tonight instead of Chinese food?”
(3) Sure, that’s fine. 😘❤️
(4) Sure, that’s fine. 😒🧐
Example (3) sounds like a text I’d get from my mom while example (4) sounds more like an annoyed boyfriend. The first gives us the sense that it isn’t a big deal while the second one gives us the sense that it might be. The word-usage of “fine,” strikes us as “adequate but not preferred,” and the emojis that follow are a kind of key to answer the question, “is it really fine?” If we receive (3) it seems to be fine, but (4) cues us into the fact that there is some passive aggression at play. We can almost read these emojis as, “that’s not what I remember agreeing on,” or “I really wanted pizza, but okay.” It acts as an appeal, similar to the way body language exposes our truths in physical conversation when we feel personal resistance to a suggestion.
Emojis are, in many scenarios, acting as emotional determinatives. They give us a sense of what someone is feeling and, if they are part of a habit, the lack of them can cause confusion. When I get a text from someone in my generation without an emoji, it can sometimes feel like the conversation has an air of formality. Along those lines, I don’t think most of us use emojis when we’re fighting over text, and there is likely a reason for this. Emojis carry extra information that is important to getting to know someone’s personality and their personal communication style, but there are only a few that carry universal meaning. Everybody has a different “frequently used” emoji list, but this does not change the fact that most people still use them to some degree.
Differences between Hieroglyphs and Emojis
This brings us to the ways that emojis and hieroglyphs are different because they undoubtedly are. There are ways that emojis could be used like hieroglyphs, but there are also ways that they will always differ. A lot of this is born from one of the largest differences between Ancient Egyptian and modern society: literacy rate. Even using the most generous figures, the literacy rate of Ancient Egypt was less than 10% while today America’s rests around 80%. This means that we have at least eight times the amount of readers and writers today than Ancient Egypt.
When there are less people writing a language, there are less people that have to agree on a uniform system. There are also less perspectives that pour into these decisions; usually the language system is created by the upper class or those fortunate enough to receive an education. In Ancient Egypt, you had to train to become a scribe in order to learn to write, something which took time and money. Today, you just need to make it past elementary school.
When there are a lot more people making choices about how writing should be used, it is a lot harder to create a standard. The Egyptian Alphabet was able to be created because scribes decided to make specific signs stand in for certain sounds. It didn’t just happen naturally; a group of people had to decide, “this is going to be our standard.” I don’t think emojis are ever going to be important enough for humanity to hold a conference where they decide: “Okay, the apple emoji 🍎is now read as ‘ah’.” That being said, it would be really cool if that happened.
Since emojis are unlikely to ever be used alphabetically, it’s even less likely they’ll be used syllabically.
But something being useful is not always the main reason it exists. Emojis have evolved heavily since they were first created and they will continue to do so. Maybe some alphabet will get created one day and the kids will be texting entirely with emojis. In fact, let’s make an emoji hieroglyph just to illustrate how it could be possible.
Let’s say for some reason we need an asparagus emoji. If we break it into syllables, we get “a,” “spa,” “ra,” and “gus.” Let’s say that “a” is represented by 🍎 like above. “Spa” is represented by 🧖 (a person at a spa), “ra” is represented by 🐀 (a ra-t), and “gus” is represented by 💨 (a gus-t). And then, just to help us categorize it, we can put a broccoli 🥦 at the end, our determinative for vegetables.
This looks absolutely ridiculous, but you can see the train of thought. If a large enough group of people had the desire to use emojis this way, it’s totally a possibility.
So, to answer the underlying question of this article, are emojis and hieroglyphics similar? Yes, 100% they are. We have all we need to use them exactly as hieroglyphics were used, we’re just missing one thing: a consensus. And it turns out, that is exceedingly important when trying to start a new way to codify language.
Emojis will likely never get to the place where they are as functionally and grammatically complex as hieroglyphics, but they have found their own unique ways to supplement our language. To some of us, they’re a large part of our communication style. Without emojis, it can feel like something is missing, personally or emotionally or otherwise. Hieroglyphics were always primarily a form of communication, but they also acquired this secondary purpose, one that allowed for expression and personality to come across. Words often had more than one writing and, although there were accepted patterns, scribes were given the liberty to experiment, just as we do everyday with emojis.
I hope you enjoyed this breakdown of emojis and hieroglyphics. Comment any observations or questions below and feel free to email me at dillon@betweentwotongues.com
Before I go, I wanted to bring up one element of emojis that interests me. Even though they often seem to add sentiment to entire sentences, their distribution is limited. Look below at the following sentences:
(5) I 😄 am so happy that we are going to the movies!
(6) I am so happy 😄 that we are going to the movies!
(7) I am so happy that we are 😄 going to the movies!
(8) I am so happy that we are going to 😄 the movies!
(9) I am so happy that we are going to the movies! 😄
It’s likely that some of these feel better than others. If you were to rank them from most likely to least likely, it might go: 9, 6, 5, 7, 8. Regardless of the order, you would probably agree that 7 and 8 don’t feel great. Something about them feels off, and it is because they are in the middle of phrases instead of before or after clauses or the subject like in (5).
This suggests that emojis might be grammatically similar to adjuncts like the adverb “really,” in that they can appear in a lot of places but not everywhere. Try to replace the emoji with “really” in examples 5-8 and see what I mean.
Thanks for reading! Until next time :)
Dillon
