Emojiglyphs

Here is my attempt to make a writing system using only emoji. The concept is largely inspired by white-o-glyphics, but the formation is rather different. White misses out on a lot of neat tricks by excluding rebuses, even though every logographic writing system throughout history makes extensive use of them!

Basics

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Compounds

Sometimes there is simply no emoji, or no clear emoji, to draw the concept we want. For this, we can use compounds:

Semantic Compounds

Take "chess" for example. There is a pawn emoji, but no chess emoji. We can add a crown before the pawn to clarify we mean chess specifically, rather than just any board game:

👑♟️chess

Alternatively, we could add a checkered flag, although this might be misinterpreted as "racing game" instead:

🏁♟️chess

Perhaps a more useful example is the construction of "I/we" from the emoji for "first place" and "person":

🥇🧍me

Phonosemantic Compounds

Take "planet" for example. There are Earth emoji, sure, but no generic planets. That's where phonosemantic compounds come in!

🌱🌎planet

This compound takes the pronounciation of "plant" using the "seedling" emoji, and combines it with an Earth emoji. Recall that, like other compounds, that the Earth is last indicates it is close to the meaning, and the other stuff is merely used to disambiguate senses.

Examples

The following example uses a semantic compound, a literal, and a phonosemantic compound. Try to work out which is which.

🥇🧍I　❤️love　🔮🙂emoji

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