2016-11-20 12:14 GMT+01:00 IS META <[email protected]>: > Dear William Overington, > Your abstract emoji are interesting. I am especially pleased that your *noun > brown* emoji express a number of grammatical cases. However, your *Some > designs for emoji of personal pronouns* is less flexible, wherein the > pronouns can only express singular and plural grammatical numbers. Is there > any chance that the system may be modified to enable the expression of dual > grammatical number? Though the dual number is rarer than the > singular–plural distinction, it occurs in many languages, including major > ones like Classical Greek, Sanskrit, and Modern Standard Arabic, and it is > far more widespread in pronominal systems. Perhaps the way American Sign > Language expresses the dual number could provide some inspiration for this. >
For such graphical notations, there's absolutely no need to distinguish singular and plural (many Asian languages do not have distinctive grammatical numbers): if the numal quantity is important, it should just be represented directly by its value (e.g. by showing hands with a number of fingers raised), but most probably by using digits directly). On the opposite I think it is much more important to be able to designate the 1st person speaking, and if she speaks for herself or in the noun of a group, the person(s) to she is speaking to (either directly, as as the representant of a group, but this could be a separate "privately" or "alone" attribute), and a generic undesignated/umpersonal 3rd person not designating anyone (he/she/it/they), possiblyt with an additional attribute (a number? an adjective for "near" versus "far", like in the distinction of "this" and "that" or "here" and "there' in English, or "left" vs."right", or "front" vs. "back") to distinguish several entities. But once again this discussion is about a long personal invention by William, that attempts since long to push it as a "standard", when he is actually alone and not qualified alone to be an academic source representing an active community, and whre he never demonstrated the existance of any active community supporting his "inventions" (often self-contradictory and constantly changing) : In other words it is out of scope for the Unicode standard. Emojis are definitely NOT used in the world the way that William thinks. William is in fact inventing since long another script (which has nothing in copmmon with Emojis) but has not been able to conveince a community to use and support it. Borrowing Emojis inside his personnaly invented script does not mean that Emojis are part of William's script. But there's a very active community using Emojis (notably in Japan), and with active support by local providers of communication channels, that developed initially separate incompatible solutions before thinking about standardizing their usage using a common agreed set (because their users wanted interoperability across providers and urged them to use comatible schemes, without loosing their freedom to use Emojis like they want, i.e. without any strong "grammatical" rules) However there's much more promizing scripts to think about, notably SignWriting (but hre also some Emojis could be borrowed, this does not mean that Emojis are full part of SignWriting, just like they are not directly part of Han signograms, or Kanas, or Latin) ! Emojis are and will remain a specific script that will never be able to express a full human language, only some small isolated items whose interpretation will remain very fuzzy, and with an extremely minimalist grammar and an minimalist orthography (the "ligature" clusters documented in Unicode), so that they can be used in various languages having very different grammars or conceptual models: the interpretation of emojis are left to readers in some linguistic, territorial, cultural, or social community, that DON'T want any strong grammar: they really love the freedom of speech and composition offered by Emojis, and certainly don't want such grammar ! So please keep William's proposed (unsupported) script completely out of way of the encoding of Emojis that are and will remain isolate symbols, with minimal interactions among themselves or with other scripts. I also note that Emojis that **should** all have neutral directionality, and should all be mirrorable where approriate (so that they'll be usable in LTR or RTL contexts), unless they explicitly express the "left" vs "right semantics (but they could also express the "start" vs. "end" semantic that MUST be mirorrable, and possibly even "rotatable" in vertical script presentations).
