I'm excited about the proposal to add a brontosaurus emoji codepoint

[Leonardo Boiko]

We obviously need an emoji for every species name listed within The
Official Registry of Zoological Nomenclature.

I propose a new set of Basic Latin characters, the Zoological Nomenclature
Indicator Symbols, to be used for spelling scientific names, which are then
rendered as cutesy colorful icons used as mood indicators.  A Zoological
Nomenclature Indicator Symbol Space must be included to separate name
components; sequences including one such separator are assumed to be
binomens, and two, trinomens.  For example, a cat emoji can be encoded with
the Zoological Nomenclature Indicator Symbols corresponding to
[FELIS␣CATUS] or, following modern practice, [FELIS␣SILVESTRIS␣CATUS]
(biological homonyms are to be treated as alternative encodings of the same
abstract emoji).

Notice that the current emoji set include such characters as CRYING CAT
FACE (U+1F63F)) and KISSING CAT FACE WITH CLOSED EYES (U+1F63D), in
addition to the default human (or, in a certain vendor, disgusting yellow
amoebæ) faces; but no such equivalents for, say, dogs or bunnies, which can
be a very dangerous political slight towards dog-people and bunny-people.
With some adjustment, Zoological Nomenclature Indicator Symbols can solve
the issue once for all, with perfect neutrality.  All of the current face
expression emoji are to be decomposed as FACE plus abstract combining
characters; for example, U+1F642 SLIGHTLY SMILING FACE will be considered a
compatibility variant of FACE + COMBINING SMILE + COMBINING SLIGHT FACIAL
EXPRESSION.  This would allow a dog version of U+1F63D encoded as:
[CANIS␣LUPUS␣FAMILIARIS] + COMBINING FACE + COMBINING KISSING FACIAL
EXPRESSION + COMBINING CLOSED EYES, and similarly for any species and
expression combination, like, say, a ring-tailed lemur rolling on the floor
laughing, or an okapi with tears of joy.  (Drawing all possible glyphs is
of course not Unicode's problem.)


2016-08-29 16:22 GMT-03:00 Leo Broukhis <leob at mailcom.com>:

> It's new. Let's not tell Randall about the "completing the set" argument.
>
> Leo
>
> On Mon, Aug 29, 2016 at 12:08 PM, Karl Williamson <public at khwilliamson.com
> > wrote:
>
>> "I'm excited about the proposal to add a brontosaurus emoji codepoint
>> because it has the potential to bring together a half-dozen different
>> groups of pedantic people together"
>>
>> From http://xkcd.com/1726/
>>
>> I don't know if this is new, or I just never saw it before.
>>
>>
>
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