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What makes a writing system such, and why emoji are not a writing system?
by jurimasa 4y ago
What makes a writing system such, and why emoji are not a writing system?
- tokinonagare 4y agoLet me introduce 2 websites that can answer your questions : Google and Wikipedia. The former allow you to search website on the called web platform, and the latter is an online collaborative encyclopedia. By using those two websites, you can easily find the definition of a writing system, which is "[...] a method of visually representing verbal communication" and reflect on the fact that since emoji aren't used to encode an oral message, they don't form a writing system.
- WorldMaker 4y agoIf you scroll down a bit further you might find Brittanica's better definition: "A writing system, technically referred to as a script or an orthography, consists of a set of visible marks, forms, or structures called characters or graphs that are related to some structure in the linguistic system." Emoji certainly classify as related to a "linguistic system" even if you don't think they have a direct verbal counterpart. Non-verbal languages certainly exist and many of them have forms of writing systems and some of those are encoded in Unicode, too. Emoji isn't the only "writing system for a non-verbal language system" encoded in Unicode.