Joseph has provided his thoughts on cuneiform, hieroglyphs, and emojis. I found most interesting his point that “Emojis are what hieroglyphics were supposed to be”. What I interpret this to mean is that hieroglyphics were originally meant to be interpreted as their literal picture. Hieroglyphics then adopted phonetic meaning for each pictogram, thus “devolving” into a language such as cuneiform. He also highlighted that emojis had very open interpretation, prohibiting its development as a language. In my own reflection, I also pointed out that emojis additionally didn’t have any phonetic sound associationed with any symbol, distancing themselves from any of the ancient languages. We both brought up the point that emojis are complementary to a language. I do not agree with the assessement that “Emojis are essentially a complex version of hieroglyphics”, however. This is because the evidence provided seems to contrast with this statement. Joseph highlighted that emojis open-ended interpretation has caused problems in court cases as an example. If it were hieroglyphics with specific meaning being used in court, there should not be any confusion.
Joseph demonstrated his learning by comparing and contrasting cuneiform, hieroglyphics, and emojis. At the end when comparing cuneiform and hieroglyphics, he stated that he would choose hieroglyphics over cuneiform. This is in support of previous writing that sided with hieroglyphics. I also lean towards the side of hieroglyphics. We both agreed that the hieroglyphics were easier to write than cuneiform. Joseph said that cuneiform requires more precision than hieroglyphics. I said that cuneiform was just more tedious to write because of the number of strokes required to complete each character. We also both agreed that hieroglyphics are easier to read. I was intrigued by the idea that hieroglyphs are easier to translate than cuneiform. Normally when I think about language, I do not consider translation. I believe that each language was originally meant to be contained within itself. This is why we see untranslatable words between certain languages and English. I think that I sometimes go read beyond the text too much, and that I miss certain surface level details that Joseph mentioned. This is not necessarily a bad thing. Next time, I will try to re-route my thinking towards what we were originally trying to investigate. My view on this unit remains that language is unique to each other, and not really meant to be compared lest we find large gaps and problems between them. I believe this view is supported in my writing assessments, where we compare the languages and see that they are not really the same.