A few of us have recently started reviving the Emoji locale Locale = language version, often a combination of a language code and a region code, for instance es_MX denotes Spanish as it’s used in Mexico. A list of all locales supported by WordPress in https://make.wordpress.org/polyglots/teams/ (art-xemoji). It’s been dormant for years, originally set up as a testing range for platform work rather than a locale anyone would use, so it has no active conventions and no maintainer. Core Core is the set of software required to run WordPress. The Core Development Team builds WordPress. sits at about 4%.
We’re now trying to give it a coherent system, and we’d like input from people who translate into languages other than English.
What this “language” is
Some constraints, so the question makes sense:
Vocabulary is 27 words. That’s the entire official glossary. Everything else has to be invented or left in English.
No plurals. Declared nplurals=1, like Japanese or Korean.
No inflection, no tense, no articles. Emoji have no morphology.
Word order is currently English. Not by design, just because whoever translated first worked from English. Nothing stops us changing it.
No phonetics. A reader can’t sound anything out. If a symbol isn’t recognisable on sight, it carries nothing.
So it behaves like a highly isolating language with a 27-word lexicon and a writing system where every character is a picture.
The question
How would you translate weekday and month names into a language like that?
One thing we’ve had to abandon early: the idea that a “culturally neutral” option exists. Emoji originated in Japan, and the early sets are full of Japanese cultural symbols that were carried into Unicode more or less intact (🎍 kadomatsu, 🎎 hina dolls, 🎏 koinobori, 🎑 tsukimi). Choosing emoji is choosing culture, whether or not we intend to.
So the useful test seems to be recognisability rather than neutrality: can someone outside the originating culture reconstruct the meaning?
By that test:
🎄 for December probably works. Christmas is widely legible even where it isn’t celebrated.
🎍 for January doesn’t, outside Japan. It reads as “some plant”.
❄️ for January fails differently: it’s perfectly legible, but wrong for everyone in the southern hemisphere, which is what the currently approved strings A string is a translatable part of the software. A translation consists of a multitude of localized strings. use (January → ❄️1️⃣, August → ☀️8️⃣).
For weekdays there’s a candidate that scores well on this test: the classical planetary mapping (☀️🌙🔥💧🌳⭐🌍). Not because it’s neutral, but because it’s already shared very widely. The Babylonian planetary week spread west into Greek and Latin and east into Persian, Indian, Chinese and Japanese, so French mardi and Japanese 火曜日 line up one to one. English is the outlier, having swapped in Norse gods.
For months, the closest equivalent is the zodiac (♈♉♊♋♌♍♎♏♐♑♒♓). Twelve signs, one per month, astronomically defined so no hemisphere flip, and the same Babylonian lineage as the weekday planets. Recognisability is mixed: the symbols are widely known in some regions and near-invisible in others, and they carry associations with astrology that not everyone will welcome. One caveat: zodiac periods don’t align with month boundaries (Aries runs 21 March to 19 April), so the mapping would be approximate rather than exact. But it’s the only twelve-item system we’ve found that doesn’t break in half the world.
What would help
If the weekday or month names in your language come from a system that isn’t Roman or Christian in origin, we’d like to hear about it. Lunar calendars, agricultural cycles, numbered months, animal cycles, anything. We’re looking for a system that enough people can reconstruct, and the Roman one clearly isn’t the only candidate.
Working notes: https://github.com/bissy/wp-emoji-locale-style-guide
Discussion in #polyglots-emoji on Slack Slack is a Collaborative Group Chat Platform https://slack.com/. The WordPress community has its own Slack Channel at https://make.wordpress.org/chat/.
#reason-request
