[maniacalrobot]

I'd agree that many Icons are context sensitive and many require the user to learn their use, but they do, mostly, provide a language agnostic approach to navigation. An icon is the same size in any language, whereas the title could be very different.

[dragonwriter]

> I'd agree that many Icons are context sensitive and many require the user to learn their use, but they do, mostly, provide a language agnostic approach to navigation.

They are "language agnostic" in that an icon system is its own language.

[dmckeon]

And it sometime appears that almost every icon system is its own special snowflake, unique more for its creator's convenience, with more creativity than reusability.

The result is more like having dozens or hundreds of different dialects of Esperanto - each system intends to be rational and useful, but the overall effect on users of multiple icon systems is more like cacophony than expressive consistency.

OTOH, the core challenge of using text labels is finding texts that work and are meaningful and reasonably consistent across dozens of written natural languages.