[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