That is what fonts are - sets of small pictures, accessible by an index.
A fair bunch of Chinese characters are also actually pictographic (they're an image of something) or ideographic (they represent an abstract idea, not a morpheme or word) in origin, if not current usage.
This stuff - synergies and conflicts between writing systems and various media - fascinates me. Chinese writing for example now suffers from the problem that if your medium doesn't allow free-form painting/graphical compositing (like our computers largely don't right now) you can't easily coin new logograms, since you need a central registry that's slow to distribute to leaf nodes (cf. Unicode). So what's happening now is that new words get coined by recombining existing characters based on their sound value, adding a phonographic layer on top. And of course inputting Chinese has also become dependent on auxiliary systems like pinyin-based IMEs.
Meanwhile, the Korean Hangul alphabet has the interesting property that some of the letters graphically derive from each other with consistent patterns of "take this, add a stroke and you get this", making it easier to design keyboards with reduced numbers of buttons to enter combos. There's the theory that this contributed to the success of texting/mobile in Korea, and is a contributing reason for the healthy mobile industry there.
I'm getting far from the original topic with this rambling, but it still reads on it in one sense: There's a lot of variety to writing systems, and it's worth thinking about emoji as a spot on the spectrum instead of in isolation.
Except that emoji aren't a writing system. Writing systems encode language. Emoji encode emotions, perhaps, or suggest collections of ideas/emotions, but don't convey language per se because there's no conventionally defined correspondence between words in a language and a given emoji.
If I give you a string in English or Chinese or Arabic or Amharic, using the conventional writing systems for those languages, each string will be interoperable as a specific sequence of words in that language. A string of emoji doesn't work that way.
Edit: to circle back, you said:
How are emoji different from other logograms?
Unicode should be used to represent language and not anti-piracy symbols or poo or snowmen. Just my opinion, though. Obviously a great many people like shit in their fonts.
But wait - what's a "normal language" and what's a normal graphical representation of it? Is it down to the development process? A lot of writing systems were originally designed/agreed upon by small groups of people, too, for example.
My questions (and other comments in this subthread) aim to get you to think more abstractly about the problem space and define your beef more accurately, because I'm interested in this question (where should Unicode draw the line) as well. Let's brainstorm, basically.
Fonts are not a clipart gallery and not a place for some committee to dump little pictures. If you want to show me a snowmen over the internet, use an image! Certainly people can understand an image of a snowmen.
Of course these are "official part of a language". But why? Under whose authority? You could cite "actual usage", but many of the emoji in Unicode certainly have seen actual usage for 10+ years in East Asia, so they qualify. And many of the letters in Unicode were in fact designed by committee prior to mass adoption by an actual population (for example the Hangul alphabet), so a lot of scripts already in Unicode originally didn't meet that barrier.
* = Letters vs. characters: Elements of alphabets are referred to as letters. Alphabets are graphical representations of phonemes, but many other writing systems encode syllables (syllabaries, like the Japanese kana), morphemes or words (logographies) instead. Unicode contains examples of all of these, and thus not just letters. So we want to talk about characters instead.
That's pretty much my point.
http://www.unicode.org/cgi-bin/GetUnihanData.pl?codepoint=7C...
You're just being petty or culturally arrogant at this point, TBH.
I say it again: If you want pictures and cliparts, use .png. If you want to write actual text, use fonts. It's as simple as that.
Why should my browser load thousands of pictures that are never used?!
Yes, it's ridiculous.
You're pulling numbers out of your ass. You also clearly don't know how font fallbacks work, despite having been told how they work in this very thread. Several times.
And you clearly don't understand that a) this thread contains unicode that my browser still doesn't show, despite your magic fallback and b) the fonts stil contain garbage that has nothing to do with fonts.
The nice part about having it Unicode is that if you copy and paste that character somewhere else, it'll still work. It never goes through what we used to have to deal where the same character value couldn't reliably be processed without knowing the intended encoding with certainty.
Also, adding political glyphs is a sure way to ruin the universality of Unicode (I'm looking at you no-piracy).
All that said, I love Unicode, it has flaws but I think it's brilliant (no sarcasm).
Also, can't wait to actually use the man-in-business-suit-levitating-glyph (sarcasm).
I'd use the Unicode sarcasm marks, but your font probably doesn't support them yet...
As someone else pointed out, it comes from Wingdings, for which there has been an effort to fully get into Unicode.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Webdings#mediaviewer/File:Webd...