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dong ngo over at cnet has been blogging about technology in vietnam lately and recently blogged about dating and the new digilanguage of love: emoticons. now, my vietnamese is just so-so i will admit. and while i grew up speaking vietnamese, i was born in the states and am only now just learning how to read and write properly. so this blog post was a nice schooling session into a world that i’m barely tapping into.
he writes in his post:
“Though most Yahoo IM emoticons are designed to mean something that’s widely understood, there are some that are interpreted here entirely differently from what they are originally designed to mean.
For example, the “time out” smiley (formed by :-t characters) is used by some to actually mean “I am going to hammer you on the head”. The “talk to the hand” and “bring it on” smileys (formed by =; and >:/ , respectively) are sometimes used to mean “bye bye.” And the “not worthy” sign ^:)^ is used to mean “po’ tay”, which is a trendy not-in-the-dictionary Vietnamese way to say “You are too much, I give up.”"
for me it was interesting to see how emoticons become appropriated and assigned new meanings. is something in the visual display of the emoticon that gives it new meaning in the vietnamese context? something as seemingly minute as a simple emoticon has a new kind of life as it moves from english to the vietnamese. it makes me wonder what other kinds of reinterpretations of emoticons exist in other languages. or what is an emoticon in chinese? does it work in the same way?
