Nice anecdote.
I share the concerns you raise in your reflection on the limits of
shared conventions. Unicode cannot be so constrained that it encodes
only universally accepted icons, but it should be constrained to not
encode characters on foot of possible conventions that are not actually
demonstrated anywhere. There's currently no convention for denoting
allergens by emoji (pictorial renditions), so that usage is something
that is speculative at the moment.
Not as speculative is the suggestion that certain food items should be
added - it seems to be an acceptable principle to encode "iconic" foods.
That would argue for emoji for milk and bread (w/o cross aliasing it as
gluten), but not for soy beans, for example.
A./
On 8/3/2015 3:24 PM, Peter Constable wrote:
Once back when I was living in Thailand, I was riding in a taxi to the
Bangkok airport on a recently-opened highway. There were road signs
posted at intervals that had a two-digit number (“60” or something
like that) enclosed in a circle. Having had enough experience with
road signage in my home country and also other countries, I recognized
this to be a speed limit.
But knowing common practices for how many Thais at the time would
obtain their driver’s license, and the education level of many Thais
coming from rural areas to work as taxi drivers in Bangkok, I was
curious enough to ask the driver what the sign meant. (He being
monolingual, this was all in Thai.) He thought for a moment and then
responded that it was the distance to the airport.
Anecdote aside, the assumption of these discussions is that symbols
are iconic — which means that the symbol communicates a conventional
semantic. And the point of this being _/conventional/_ is that the
semantic is not self-evident from the appearance of the image, but
rather is based on a shared agreement. For example, a photograph of a
chair is not iconic since it is an ostensive rendition of an actual
chair. But a symbol of an iron with a dot inside it intended to mean
“can be ironed with low heat” is iconic because it’s meaning is
conventional, and like any convention, must be learned.
Some conventions may be universally learned, but very few are. Most
are limited to particular cultures, and even if used in many cultures,
may be learned by only small portions of the given culture. Even
something like a speed limit sign that a driver without a given
culture sees every day and is expected to understand is not
necessarily something that the driver has learned. Much less something
like icons for handling of laundry, which have been used in several
countries for a few decades now but that nobody has ever been required
to learn, and that few people actually do learn to any great extent.
Peter
*From:*Unicode [mailto:[email protected]] *On Behalf Of
*Asmus Freytag (t)
*Sent:* Monday, August 3, 2015 12:01 PM
*To:* [email protected]
*Subject:* Re: Emoji characters for food allergens
I'm sorry to really disagree with this little understandable criticism of
laundry symbols. The most encountered of the care tags are self-explaining, as
the washing and iron temperature limits or discouraging. The other symbols
mainly concern dry cleaning and laundry professionals.
The laundry symbols are like traffic signs. The ones you see daily
aren't difficult to remember, but any there are always some rare ones
that are a bit baffling. What you apparently do not realize is that in
significant parts of the world, these symbols are not common (or occur
only as adjunct to text). There's therefore no daily reinforcement at all.
Where you live, the situation is reversed; no wonder you are baffled.
All chefs understand English,
I would regard that statement to have a very high probability of being
wrong. Which would make any conclusions based on it invalid.
