[WalterBright]

The increasing use of icons and emoji suggests that English will become like Chinese!

(Ever try to look up an icon in a dictionary? This puts paid to the idea that icons are decipherable by people who don't know the language. Copyrighting the icons makes even that infinitely worse, as it prevents standardization.)

[drhodes]

An icon? no. There are however, online hanzi dictionaries where the user draws a character, here's one:

http://ce.linedict.com/dict.html#/cnen/home

See the paintbrush next to the magnifying glass in the search field.

[yorwba]

Also not for icons but for math symbols: http://detexify.kirelabs.org/classify.html

Really useful when you want to use "that squiggly thingy" but don't know the TeX command.

[dTal]

I usually jump straight to http://shapecatcher.com/ for arbitrary Unicode.

[Kirth]

I'm not sure where you've seen this "increasing use of icons and emoji". When I encounter people (this is pretty much limited to teenagers) use emoji, they have very little communicative value.

In the modern era the use of pictographs has become Chinese's Achilles' heel: the hanzi are not sortable. The very things that define the Chinese are what makes it stupidly difficult to get computers to grok the language.

[WalterBright]

> I'm not sure where you've seen this "increasing use of icons

Consider all the icons used for "print" as if the letters P R I N T are unclear. Even for non-english speakers, it's trivial to look up the word in a dictionary, and impossible to look up the icon. Ditto for replacing "ON" with |. It's just madness.

> and emoji.

Perhaps their recent appearance in Unicode, and the several screens of them that appeared on my iphone texting app.

[leemailll]

By which way you mean Chinese is not sortable?

[United857]

They usually sort by number of strokes.

[pacaro]

There are many ways to sort. Typically sorted first by radical, then by number of strokes.

There's more than one ordering of the radicals, and choices to be made when characters have the same radical and the same number of strokes

Paper dictionaries are very thumbable though, the current radical is usually highlighted in a way that makes it easy to flick through and find what you need

[Animats]

A running joke in Gibson's "Idoru" is that the lead character, through all her adventures, carries an icon dictionary.

[w1ntermute]

This is already encouraged in the latest iMessage, which highlights emojifiable words and makes it easy to emojify them: http://i.imgur.com/r26ABsw.jpg