We're going back to hundreds/thousands of unique characters. See the growth of icons and emojis, and Unicode's rush to invent endless new "characters".
> maybe even some
I.e. unreliable :-/
It took millennia for us to go from emojis to characters and the few societies that did ended up dominating the world because of the increases in efficiency. Now we're heading in the other direction because literacy is too hard.
And aside from emoji (which is demand-driven), Unicode isn't inventing anything, it's codifying things that already exist.
Care to take a stab at the difference between these and emoji?
The vast majority are complex compounds of smaller radicals.
They are nothing like emoji.
This is one of the most absurd things I have ever read, but in an extremely funny way!
I think you're trying to make the argument that both Chinese characters and emoji are pictographs. Yes, a few Chinese characters originated as pictographs (a tiny minority of them), and emoji are one form of pictograph, but that... doesn't make Chinese characters emoji, not even "the original ones". It doesn't even put them on the same "continuum" -- one is stroke-based logograms that represent individual syllables of words, the other is pure artistic illustration.
You seem to be trying to redefine the word "emoji" into something it's not, your own idiosyncratic personal definition. But that's not how words work.
Really? Funny that neither of those shapes is convex.
All I can say is LOL to that. Even the original Mac icons required someone to tell you what they meant first, down to today where half the icons on a car's controls make no sense, and of course there are the laundry icons, which people can probably guess correctly half of them.
> letters where you have to learn how to pronounce an otherwise mostly arbitrary squiggle.
Yes, we learn the sounds they make in first grade. Then we can sound out new words, and look up the meanings of words in the dictionary. Not so with icons. There's no sounding them out. There's no way to look them up in a dictionary. If you can't guess what they mean, you're out of luck.
> arbitrary squiggle
The letters are all derived from icons. The letter A is a bull's head and horns turned upside down. Phonetic alphabets are derived from icon languages, and are a great invention.
> Unicode isn't inventing anything, it's codifying things that already exist.
Not true. As for emoji, there is no difference between them and icons.