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<div class="moz-text-flowed" style="font-family: -moz-fixed;
font-size: 12px;" lang="x-unicode">On 9/15/21 4:47 PM, Asmus
Freytag via Unicode wrote:
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It's a writing system that has global reach (even if not
"high-brow") and is actively, you could even say
enthusiastically, supported by systems/font vendors (and users).
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I was telling someone once about Unicode: it's the standard for
representing letters of all alphabets, etc, they're the ones who
officially encode emoji, etc. The response was surprise: "Why
encode emoji? Who uses those?" "Um... millions of people, every
day, in tweets and stuff?" "Yeah, but apart from that?" Well,
yeah, apart from the people who use them, nobody uses them. But
that's true of English letters too. Just that emoji usage wasn't
"high-brow" enough for this listener, apparently.
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<blockquote type="cite" style="color: #007cff;">
<blockquote type="cite" style="color: #007cff;">It's more like
encoding a brand-new character in the IPA that hasn't seen use
yet, but we know people use the IPA and so this letter will be
used. (I know, the parallel isn't perfect: an IPA character
would have been approved by the IPA, etc. Try to see the
forest for the trees.)
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When it comes to new items, mathematical symbols may be more
similar. Because of existing, parallel technologies, like TeX,
it's possible for that notation to innovate in advance of
standardizing by Unicode. However, de-facto, the collection is
unbounded and actively being added to. Not all fields of
mathematics will ever expand with equal popularity; so there's a
similar issue with additions not equally guaranteed to be of the
same importance/ popularity/longevity.
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Yeah, that's a good example, though math symbols also have to show
usage before being encoded. They have better mechanisms for
avoiding the chicken-and-egg problem.
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When it comes to immediate support, currency symbols come to
mind. They form an unbounded set of their own, with active
innovation happening, but users not really having a choice
whether or not to use a new symbol (the only thing is that the
currency could fail and all usage to become historical).
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This is probably a better example: there is built-in demand that
we know is there, and it's adding a symbol to an "alphabet" that's
already supported.
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<blockquote type="cite" style="color: #007cff;">
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<blockquote type="cite" style="color: #007cff;">So, yeah, emoji
are weird, but I don't think they can be generalized. </blockquote>
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They fit the intersection between pictographic writing systems
with unbounded collection and writing systems (symbol
collections) with active innovation.
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To the extent that no other system shows just that combination
of trends you can't derive any parallels; on the other hand,
they have a define place in any Venn diagram of writing systems.
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Yes. By "generalized" I meant you can't generalize Unicode's
treatment of them to other situations. I think we're saying the
same thing.
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~mark
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