Re: Major vendors changing U+1F52B PISTOL �� depiction from firearm to squirt gun

Martin J. Dürst via Unicode unicode at unicode.org
Wed May 23 20:18:10 CDT 2018


On 2018/05/24 03:00, Michael Everson via Unicode wrote:
> I consider it a significant semantic shift from the intended meaning of the character in the source Japanese character set.

Yes and no. I'd consider the semantic shift from a real pistol in a 
Japanese message to a real pistol in a message in the US quite significant.

The former, except for some extremely small and marginal segment of 
Japanese society, essentially has no "I might shoot you" implications at 
all. In the later case, that may be quite a bit different.

I'm not saying the (glyph or whatever you call it) change was okay. But 
when talking about semantics, it's important to not only consider 
surface semantics, but also the overall context.

Regards,   Martin.


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