Re: Thoughts on working with the Emoji Subcommittee (was Re: Thoughts on Emoji Selection Process)

[Asmus Freytag via Unicode]

On 8/21/2018 1:01 AM, Julian Bradfield via Unicode wrote: On 2018-08-20, Mark E. Shoulson via Unicode <unicode@unicode.org> wrote: Moreover, they [William's pronoun symbols] are once again an attempt to shoehorn Overington's pet project, "language-independent sentences/words," which are still generally deemed out of scope for Unicode. I find it increasingly hard to understand why William's project is out of scope (apart from the "demonstrate use first, then encode" principle, which is in any case not applied to emoji), when emoji are language-independent words - or even sentences: the GROWING HEART emoji is (I presume) supposed to be a language-independent way of saying "I love you more every day". Which seems rather more fatuous as a thing to put in a writing-systems standard than the things I think William would want. Not that I want to hear any more about William's unmentionables; I just wish emoji were equally unmentionable. Unicode is descriptive, not prescriptive (or tries to be). In other words, it generally tries to track what people use in writing (including "have used" in the case of obsolete/historic characters and scripts). Focusing on abstract commonalities misses the point: some things are in use by large, active user communities that have "voted with their feet" to treat these on the same footing as "characters". Being descriptive means that Unicode necessarily will (have to) follow. It does not mean that other items that are formally of a similar category should necessarily be treated the same way: they are ideas and not part of a system that is already in near universal use. A./