Comment on Bitcoin is Stupid and Does Not Deserve an Emoji (blog post)
ricecake@sh.itjust.works 1 month ago
Bitcoin is stupid, but the point of Unicode is that we have a symbol for everything that has a commonly recognized symbol or representative value, or even uncommonly recognized.
If ⅌ gets a character, or all the symbols of the Byzantine musical notation system, I’m not sure why a typically recognized symbol for a cryptocurrency shouldn’t.
The weird bit is that they put together a petition. All you really need to do is submit a proposal and show that it’s a notable symbol and not owned by anyone in particular or a brand icon.
Here’s the proposal to add “goose” to Unicode. They even added a few joke-y bits, but they made a valid argument that “goose” is a symbol that people recognize. And now… 🪿
lunarul@lemmy.world 1 month ago
I don’t disagree with the overall comment, but there’s a difference between character and emoji. ⅌ got a character, but so did ₿ already.
ricecake@sh.itjust.works 1 month ago
There really isn’t a difference between a character and an emoji beyond an emoji being a stylized rendering of a character, or a character whose use is intended as a pictograph.
www.unicode.org/reports/tr51/#Introduction
They’re all just Unicode code points, although I suppose there’s some distinction between the characters with more context specific meaning or the ones that are more apt to modification a la 🧑⚕️👩🏿⚕️. But you’ve also got 💲 and $, where “bold dollar sign” is often represented as green, but “dollar sign” tends to be represented in contextual style. Is ☣ a character or an emoji? What about the thousands of “other symbols” as defined by the Unicode spec which may or may not have special character renderings depending on your platform and font?
And yeah, I didn’t know that character existed, so now it’s doubly confusing why anyone is asking for anything. The symbol has meaning, and it’s in the big book of meaningful symbols. Not sure what more they want.
lunarul@lemmy.world 1 month ago
There’s no ambiguity. Emoji are characters in the emoticons code block (U+1F600…U+1F64F). Emoji are indeed a subset of characters, but anything outside that block is not an emoji.