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this post was submitted on 14 Dec 2023
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I always get a little bit annoyed with emoji because they had the opportunity to become an interesting pictographic language. But because of various insistences on them representing things rather than concepts we've sort of got stuck and the floppy disk have to be floppy disk is an example of that.
What I mean is things that are difficult to convey in language. Like how we've had to resort to /s and italics and bold to convey emphasis. All the open box symbol that is used to indicate a space rather than just having a gap.
If you create a pictographic language and get others to use it, Unicode will include your characters. They included Chinese and other pictographic ways of writing, after all.
I don't think pictographic language is that great. Every picture has cultural associations (just look at the associations with 🍆, 🍑, or 🥺). If you would like to communicate through pictographic symbols representing concepts, there's a wide range of them that over a billion people use every day, and that is (almost) entirely included in Unicode already.
Chinese is of course not a pictographic language it's an alphabet like western alphabets.
We kind of have pictograms in Unicode already like ☢️ or ⚠️ or ⚡ which are universal even though they don't really represent physical objects.
The radiation icon particular doesn't really make any kind of logical sense, radiation is in non-visual threat so there's no reason it should look like that, over anything else, and yet everyone knows that's what the symbol means. It's not a picture of something, it's the picture of a concept.
Equally there's no real reason that warning should be a triangle and electricity definitely doesn't look like that. Again though we kind of don't even think about it we just know what the symbols mean. With Chinese you actually have to learn the language like you have to learn english or you have to learn Italian.