because damnit, unicode doesn’t solve anything.
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check your privilege!
One way to read the story of Unicode in the time of emoji is to see a privileged generation of tech consumers confronting the fact that they can’t communicate in ways they want to on their devices: through emoji. They get involved in standards-making, which yields them some satisfaction but slows down the speed with which millions of others around the world get access to the most basic of online linguistic powers
do read the language log post
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“Manspreading TV aerial window Omuta”.
It’s all so obvious now. 
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There is a very cool book called “Everyone Here Spoke Sign Language”. It’s a cultural history of Martha’s Vineyard.
Although MV is a 1%er playground now, it was not always thus. Earlier, it was a rural backwater, originally colonised by a single ship loaded with immigrants from a single village.
Purely by random chance, that village had a higher than usual rate of hereditary deafness. Due to the isolation of pre-modern Martha’s Vineyard, the local gene pool got a little…shallow.
The consequence of this is that deafness became very common…so common that it ceased to be a significant disability, as sign language was pretty much universal.
There’s a cool bit in the book recounting an apparently common scene:
- A bunch of men gathered in the local store, one of them telling a dirty joke.
- One of the local women enters the store.
- Mid-sentence, without pause, the joke-teller switches into sign so he can complete the joke without causing offence to the newcomer.
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You’re quite the cunning linguist.
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It’s funny that you use getting around as an example of Japanese making it easier to navigate because I’ve always thought the opposite. In terms of pattern recognition, kanji are probably easier to read at a glance but as soon as you have to start asking for directions or telling people where you are then you might as well just start saying random phonemes at people and hope you’re somewhere in the right ballpark.
"Well, I guess it’s most likely to be one of the five Chinese rather than readings than the three Japanese readings of that obscure kanji that’s only ever used in place names and doesn’t have an independent meaning. I’ll try [insert completely logical reading guesswork here].
Why is everyone laughing? Oh, it’s because only the name of this town uses a reading for that kanji that exists nowhere else in the language and is entirely unique, and you’re just expected to know that because everyone knows that. Spectacular."
By contrast, I taught myself enough Hangul to be able to get by in Seoul in about 20 minutes in a cafe by looking at place names on a bilingual map. I know that Korean is like Japanese and has way too many homophones but I’d take slightly adapted Hangul for English instead of Roman characters any day. Kanji can fuck right off, however.
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I did get it with student’s names more than I was happy with.
“It’s ‘Tanaka’ but you’re not using two of the simplest kanji ever for it like everyone else? What kanji do you… OH MY GOD! Screw you, we’re using romaji.”
I did find both Korea and Japan really easy to get around via reading. Taiwan on the other hand… I lost a lot of weight walking that month. Especially since the Taichung taxi drivers were fond of the “tourist fare”
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