it turns out that, to many people's surprise, trying to create a computer encoding for every human written language is extremely political, and weird compromise

it turns out that, to many people's surprise, trying to create a computer encoding for every human written language is extremely political, and weird compromises have to be made. I think initially the CJK unification was because unicode thought they'd only ever need 16 bits, and that's pretty much the only way to fit all those characters in that space. now it's up to 21 bits and I wonder if that will ultimately be enough. But effectively the presentation system (in theory, stuff still needs to implement it) does make "pawn" and "emoji pawn", by having "emoji pawn" be [pawn character] [emoji presentation character]