From: Leo Broukhis (leob@mailcom.com)
Date: Sun Jan 11 2009 - 16:42:59 CST
On Sun, Jan 11, 2009 at 2:05 PM, John Hudson <john@tiro.ca> wrote:
> It is absurd, but so is the contention that a pictorial representation is
> semiotically equivalent to a word.
I did not say "semiotically", I said "semantically". An abstract
picture of a dog - with no recognizable traits of a particular breed,
mind you - when it occurs in plain text in language X will have the
same meaning as the corresponding stylistically neutral word for Canis
familiaris in language X.
Or is Unicode is into separating glyphs by semiotics now?
> The sequence of letters 'dog' spells a
> particular word that has a particular meaning in a particular language; it
> may, indeed, have some totally different meaning in a different language. A
> picture of the animal known in English as a dog has no such particular
> meaning, it is chien, hund, chó, собака, etc. Familiarity with the spelling
> conventions of English, such as they are, enables one to pronounce the name
> for this animal. A picture of a dog tells you nothing about the
> pronunciation the name in any language.
>
> All that said, if a dog's head emoji is encoded in Unicode, I vote for the
> reference glyph to be a Wheaten Terrier.
You'll be messing with semiotics then. It should be a mutt, not a
pure-breed dog.
Leo
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