kenyatta:

Emails seen by BuzzFeed News reveal an emerging tension at the Unicode Consortium — the 24-year-old organization that was established to develop standards for translating alphabets into code that can be read across all computers and operating systems.

The series of frustrated messages show a deepening rift between those who adhere to the organization’s original mission to code old and obscure and minority languages and those who are investing time and resources toward Unicode’s newer and most popular character sets: emojis, a quirky periodic table of ideograms and smiley faces that cover everything from bemused laughter to swirling, smiling piles of poop. The correspondence offers a peek behind the scenes of the peculiar and little-known organization that’s unexpectedly been tasked with building what some see as the first digital universal language.

In a series of acerbic emails on a chain celebrating Unicode and emojis’ mention on The Late Show With Stephen Colbert last March, legendary Unicode contributor and typographer Michael Everson railed against the consortium, suggesting that the organization’s focus on emojis is hurting the work of scholars like himself.

“It’s delightful that everyone is so happy about Mr. Colbert, but I can tell you that many people are thinking that the UTC has lost the plot,” he scolded. “Emoji, emoji, emoji. It’s all about emoji.”

[…]

Everson, who has spent decades encoding characters for Unicode — a 2003 New York Times profile cited him as “probably the world’s leading expert in the computer encoding of scripts” — says that his frustrations stem from the consortium’s failure to provide “actionable feedback” on a medieval punctuation proposal that he placed in front of the committee in 2007.

“I’m editing some documents in medieval Cornish, and I personally need some of these characters. Their absence is impeding my work,” Everson told BuzzFeed News via Skype from his home in Ireland.

This is a fascinating look at both old languages (medieval Cornish) and new ones (emoji.)

Also: @buzzfeed is becoming The Intercept of Emoji and it is great.