Unicode uses elephants as baseline comparison of cultural frequency for emoji

Re:Unicode uses elephants as baseline comparison of cultural... by dmonitor on Thursday October 17, 2024 @04:18PM (#41873330)

> There is already an emoji for frog, which can be used to represent all amphibians.

I'm not a big fan of this example. Does "lizard" represent all reptiles? "dog" all mammals? I suppose salamanders are taxonomically similar enough to lizards that specific amphibian emoji aren't necessary for them, but that's not the reason given.

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Re:Unicode uses elephants as baseline comparison of cultural... by giraffe_lady on Thursday October 17, 2024 @05:22PM (#41873943)

Lyra Belacqua would have been a master emoji texter.

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Re:Unicode uses elephants as baseline comparison of cultural... by bombcar on Friday October 18, 2024 @06:29AM (#41878009)

We already have combining characters (for example you can make emojis with various skin shades) and they should enable “alternates” for other emojis.

Let there be ten thousand cat breed emojis via combining characters!

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Re:Unicode uses elephants as baseline comparison of cultural... by rsynnott on Friday October 18, 2024 @07:39AM (#41878433)

This is, IIRC, how the lime works; according to the Unicode consortium, a lime is a green lemon.

(It would be much more fun if they'd just represented them as citrus hybrids with ZWJs.)

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Re:Unicode uses elephants as baseline comparison of cultural... by zahlman on Saturday October 19, 2024 @01:51PM (#41889333)

To be fair, the genetics of all the various citrus species are pretty wild (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Citrus_taxonomy).

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Re:Unicode uses elephants as baseline comparison of cultural... by rsynnott on Friday October 18, 2024 @07:37AM (#41878424)

Once they open the door to other amphibians, they will end up getting drawn into the whole "do toads exist" debate, and it frankly just isn't worth it.

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