Thoughts on working with the Emoji Subcommittee (was Re: Thoughts on Emoji Selection Process)

James Kass via Unicode unicode at unicode.org
Sun Aug 19 01:37:44 CDT 2018


William Overington wrote,

> The designs that I have produced for abstract emoji of
> personal pronouns could be drawn, whilst each retaining
> enough of their shape information to still convey the
> intended meaning, in, say, the style of the Comic Sans
> font. So the designs that I produced are not necessarily > subject to that ruling; yet I do need to add that the
> designs that I produced are somewhat constrained against
> as much variation as is possible for many emoji. Yet the
> designs that I produced have about as much flexibility as
> to glyph design as do letters of the English alphabet.

Exactly, except for the part about 'not necessarily subject to that ruling'.

Quoting from,

https://www.thoughtco.com/what-is-alphabet-1689080

... which is quoting from Mitchell Stephens, The Rise of the Image,
the Fall of the Word. Oxford University Press, 1998 ...

"In about 1500 B.C., the world's first alphabet appeared among the
Semites in Canaan. It featured a limited number of abstract symbols
(at one point thirty-two, later reduced to twenty-two) out of which
most of the sounds of speech could be represented. The Old Testament
was written in a version of this alphabet. ..."

(Of course, nobody called it "The Old Testament" back then.)

Do you consider alphabetic letters to be anything other than abstract symbols?

You've devised a set of abstract symbols to depict personal pronouns
based on typical verb conjugation diagrams.  It's my opinion that such
symbols aren't emoji candidates, but I am not an emoji expert.


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