Emoji - pictorial characters - really descended from the first writing
systems ... which *were* pictorial characters ... visibly so in ancient
Egyptian, as in ancient hanzi/kanji. Egyptian and Asian artists often
mixed pictorial text with pictorial artwork.
A famous European example of marginal signs in print was the "dangerous
curve" sign used in the mathematical writings of the Nicolas Bourbaki group.
Living in Japan in the 1970's, before any personal computers there, we
saw many books with marginal cartoon characters and other such
meta-text, which I imagine were the immediate antecedent of emoji in the
Japanese computer context.
Joe
