: Re: Transcribing a fictional pictograph based language 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

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.

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: Yes, these family collaborations are fraught with dangers, as you can imagine. There's nothing wrong with having a family member do the editing if the person is qualified and agreeable. I

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