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Like everything else, because of all the edge cases. Every symbol in Morse? Easy. Every symbol in ASCII? Easy. Add accents, and now you need to ask: are these (1) unique letters with their own sort order, or (2) modifiers that go "on top of" other letters? Answers may vary by language. Add ligatures, and now you're also forced to care about character length even if you would rather not, e.g. ﷽ (U+FDFD). Emoji? Simple ones are fine… but the general case has ways to combine characters to make different icons, making them a systematic synthlang in the same style as Chinese and Japanese[0]. What even is the right sort order of "4", "四", and "៤"? Or "a" vs. "A"? What about writing directions? LTR, RTL, the ancient Greek thing whose name I forget with alternating directions on each line, the Egyptian hieroglyphics where it can be either depending on which way the heads face, or vertical? What about alphabets like Arabic where glyphs are not in general separate, and where they can take different forms depending on if they're the first in a word, the last in a word, in the middle of a word, or isolated? What about archaic letter forms? e.g. ſ, þ, and ð in old English. [0] where I will probably embarrass myself by suggesting 犭(dog) + 瓜 (melon) = 狐 (fox), which, though cute, feels like as much a false etymology as suggesting that in English "congress" is the opposite of "progress". Or perhaps Japanese foxes really are melon dogs — I don't know, I can barely count to 4 in that specific writing system. |
I don't know Japanese but with what I know about classical Chinese character construction, I'd expect that melon acts as a phonetic hint and dog hints at the meaning (e.g. the word this character represents sounds like "Melon" but is related to "Dog").
Edit: I was curious and looked it up, it's exactly this https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%E7%8B%90#Chinese