Emoji

While the chinese writing system includes up to 60’000 characters, only around 3000 are used for everyday japanese and 5000 for chinese. The system has stopped evolving: no new characters are created nowadays. Still the notion that a character is a concept is a powerful one, as shown by the increased usage of emoticons in electronic writing forms. The japanese telecom operators have started to formalize this system and called it 絵文字emoji (literally emo-characters). There is now a proposal to stand­ardize those char­acters in Unicode. Around 100 emoji characters are already present in Unicode (in the dingbat range), but this proposal still adds around 600 new symbols, including various types of flowers, and symbol for Japanese holidays. The table for the proposal is one the Unicode Consortium’s web site.

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