> the code points required for new emoji support are now considered final, and stable to be included in updates from major vendors such as Apple, Google, Microsoft or Samsung.
Ah, the UK gets separate flags for England, Scotland, and Wales... maybe the Unicode Consortium know something about the state of the union that we don't... :)
> Flags for England, Scotland and Wales are part of Emoji 5.0 and not shown here as they don't require new code points.
Apparently Unicode Inc. isn't concerned with flag emoji at all. This 'Emoji 5.0' is a completely independent standard.
Personally, I prefer reading about Unicode updates from http://babelstone.blogspot.com/ ; it doesn't mix up details like those, and covers additions beyond sensationalist fluff like emoji.
Up until now, the written word has been primarily used to convey mental state from one person to another. Emoji (and cruder emoticons before them) are the first time that text has been widely used to convey emotional state. Yes, they have issues — they can be ambiguous and they can differ subtly between intended and understood meaning, especially between different platforms. But early forms of the written word were just as bad (some might argue they still are).
In a short time we've evolved these new concepts from crude repurposing of punctuation to ambiguous yellow faces to skin-tone selectable faces, and now others are able to be formed with bigrams. All within a decade or two. The rate of adoption, experimentation, and advancement of what amounts to effectively an entirely new form of human communication is incredible.
Groan all you want, but 10 years from now, emoji (or their derivatives) will be as fundamental a form of communication as alphabetic text. Twenty years from now, and proper use for formal and informal contexts will be taught in school.
Plain text will seem outdated as telegram stop I for one can't wait stop
It's simply not true that "emoji are the first time that text has been widely used to convey emotional state". It's just done it with words rather than cartoonish face icons. Almost from the beginning text has conveyed emotional state. Read any of the biblical psalms ("Have mercy on me, O God!") or other emotion-conveying passages in the Bible ("Jesus wept"). And other texts, ancient and modern, convey emotional state too -- all the time: most poems, most fiction, and a lot of non-fiction.
As for your other claim that emoji "will be as fundamental a form of communication as alphabetic text" in 10 years, I'm pretty skeptical about that, but I guess time will tell. I for one very much appreciate the written word, and hope that my books aren't filled with yellow faces anytime soon.
Key to my point was "widely". I should have also clarified that it's the author's emotional state, and that it's the emotional state as it pertains to the text.
Many people send emoji with nearly every cluster of related sentences. Both the frequency we communicate our emotions and the granularity of doing so have skyrocketed in the past five years alone.
Edit: You may appreciate the written word as-is, but consider that emoji have dramatically increased the expressiveness of written text. Historically, written text has often been misinterpreted due to lack of contextual information. Was the person joking? Were they serious but it's not really a big deal? Was something said in anger, sorrow, or joy? Emoji are still a crude tool, but they're a marked improvement over the previous situation where people left these context clues out of their messages entirely.
I use to feel that way. I've come to realize that people use emoji, far more than most unicode. It is a fantastic tool to expose the complexities of Unicode to developers that were only handling BMP or didn't consider composite characters before.
Didn't see any Japanese brands in that list.