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

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./