On Mon, 14 Feb 2005 07:33:22 -0500, Peter T. Daniels
<grammatim@...> wrote:

> Icons are not writing because they do not "represent an utterance in
> such a way that the utterance can be recovered more or less exactly
> without the intervention of the utterer."

All-righty. OK with me! Nothing like a world authority's clarification.
I'll accept the close connection with utterance (which, by the way,
encompasses more than speech, as I hear it).

Clearly, this implies that, say, all Unicode code points correspond to
utterances (unless they are "control" characters, in a broad sense, such
as the zero-width non-joiner, for instance). (P.S.: But wait...)

On further thought, though, browsing through Unicode 3.0 (bound volume), I
see in Arabic and some Asian (not CJ, nor Korean) Signs of various kinds,
as well as letterlike symbols and Misc. Tech. (U+2300 ff.) There are many
more. While none of these is an icon, I do think that at least some of
them, and punctuation in some cases (end of paragraph, or such) do not
routinely correspond to utterances.

A question comes to mind: Does this then mean that inclusion into Unicode
signifies that such symbols, etc. are not part of the world's writing
systems?

I mean this only as a gentle query, hardly a scrappy major challenge, or
such, by any means!

It might be worth reminding that the Ruputer, probably the first
somewhat-practical wrist computer, made very good use of CJK as de facto
icons in many instances.

> The cursor is animated: the watch's hands turn during "Wait," and I can
> replace the watch with all sorts of animations -- I like the rotating
> globe best -- and it changes shape as its available function changes as
> it moves across the screen.

Ah, of course. Thank you. Seems to me that such are more characteristic of
Macs, and I do like Macs, although <off-topic> unfortunately I don't have
routine access to any that are up-to-date. (I do have a couple of
Performas, set aside, that were saved from the curb by someone else,
after a rain. Someday, I'll see whether they still work.) </off-topic>

Late thought: Considering that it's technically easy to create animated
glyphs, could they become part of future writing systems? (I think the
annoyance factor would be a major consideration.) As well, they could not
easily be printed, except as sequences of frames, hardly desirable. We
have already discussed color in glyphs (do I mean glyphs?) a while back;
it turned out to be far more interesting than I'd expected, too.

Thank you, Peter!

My regards to all,

--
Nicholas Bodley /*|*\ Waltham, Mass.
The latest little Mac is a gem, I think.
Wonder what Edward Tufte has to say about writing systems...