2018-02-14 20:50 GMT+01:00 Ken Whistler via Unicode <unicode@unicode.org>:
> > On 2/14/2018 12:53 AM, Erik Pedersen via Unicode wrote: > >> Unlike text composed of the world’s traditional alphabetic, syllabic, >> abugida or CJK characters, emoji convey no utilitarian and unambiguous >> information content. >> > > I think this represents a misunderstanding of the function of emoji in > written communication, as well as a rather narrow concept of how writing > systems work and why they have evolved. > > RECALLTHATWHENALPHABETSWEREFIRSTINVENTEDPEOPLEWROTETEXTLIKETHIS > RCLLTHTWHNLPHBTSWRFRSTNVNTDPPLWRTTXTLKTHS ! The concept of vowels as distinctive letters came later, even the letter A was initially a representation of a glottal stop consonnant, sometimes mute, only written to indicate a word that did not start by a consonnant in their first syllable, letter. This has survived today in abjads and abugidas where vowels became optional diacritics, but that evolved as plain diacritics in Indic abugidas. The situation is even more complex because clusters of consonnants were also represented in early vowel-less alphabets to represent full syllables (this has formed the base of todays syllabaries when only some glyph variants of the base consonnant was introduced to distinguish their vocalization; Indic abugidas with their complex clusters where vowel diacritic create contextual variant forms of the base consonnant is also a remnant of this old age): the separation of phonetic consonnants came only later. Today's alphabets have a long history of evolution and adaptation to new needs for more precise communication and easier distinctions in languages that have also evolved; some new letters or diacritics were progressively abandonned, and but as the historic alphabets have persisted, then came the concept of digrams to represent a single sound by multiple letters, instead of inventing a new letter or diacritic, because the language in which these digrams were used almost never needed the phonetic letter pairs or their phonology (or such letter pair was too rarely needed that such use of digrams did not make the text undecipherable given the context of use). Over time the alphabets became less and less representative of the phonology (which evolved more rapidly than orthographies for texts that languages wanted to preserve, or because various local phonetic variants of the languages could stil lremain unified by keeping mute letters or letters representing sounds realized differently across regions). The invention of bicameral scripts later allowed easier distinction or reading when contextual forms could be used to emphasize the structure without necessarily using punctuation signs (the lowercase letters came from handwriting, because the initial engraved letters were to difficult to trace with a plum or pencil: letters were joined). Punctuation signs came later which could have deprecated the use of bicameral orthography, but languages have constinued to borrow terms from other languages, and the bicameral distinction became important to preserve. The invention of printing also produced artefacts in the orthography by the adoption of many abbreviation signs (because the paper or parchemins were expensive), and forced some simplifications of the handwritten style with a plum or pencil. Our recent age of computers (or even before the mechanical typewritters) have also dramatically simplified the alphabets because the character set was severely reduced by limitations of the initial technologies (this could have potentially killed all the abjads, abugidas, syllabaries or ideo-phonographic scripts during the 20th century, if there was not a popular resistance to preserve the culture of the initial texts written by humans, and notably the precious religious books): it is still difficult today to preserve many of the non-alphabetic scripts, and there's also difficulties to preserve the meaning diacritics in abjads and abugidas and even in alphabets, as well as bicameral distinctions. Finally the preservation of letters inherited from etymology to allow readers to infer semantics from words is difficult: this is the wellknown problem of orthographic reforms that tend to remove mute letters, remove some phonetic distinctions in letters and infer more and more the semantic from the context: we are in fact slowly returning to the old age of: RCLLTHTWHNLPHBTSWRFRSTNVNTDPPLWRTTXTLKTHS ! And the use (or abuse) of emojis is returning us to the prehistory when people draw animals on walls of caverns: this was a very slow communication, not giving a rich semantic, full of ambiguities about what is really meant, and in fact a severe loss of knowledge where people will not communicate easily and rapidly. The Emojis are a threat to the inherited culture, knowledge and science in general: we won't understand what was meant, and will loose our language to a point where it will be very unproductive and will generate more conflicts against people... Since the begining of the 20th century (and notably since WW2) we have developed lot of communication means, but we also see recently a severe degradation of litteracy and a growing social fracture for accessing the knowledge: the huge recent development of audio/video instead of text is a sever threat to preservation of culture: these audio/video contents are much more difficult to preserve than text. We can expect a degradation of general knowledge by the population, and a growing gap with those that have access to the inherited culture if we don't preserve (with Unicode) our text heritage which has proven to be very productive and allowed the development of science, and allowed to coordinate variable societies and allowed to communicat with people with variable cultures or across generations...