logograms

But what makes them logographic, is the pervasive use of logograms in a semantic role to disambiguate meanings.

These ever-growing icon fonts make me wonder whether the Chinese were on to something when they designed their logograms.

Alphabets (ABC) are for phonemes, syllabaries are for syllables (hiragana, Cherokee), logograms are for words (chinese characters).

Canaanites simplified it further by tossing all the ideograms, logograms and multi-consonant symbols to create an abjad.

They also seem to exhibit combinations of logograms to denote new meanigns and phonetic writing from a very early stage.

While a minority of characters are indeed pure logograms (小，大，田，etc.), most modern Chinese words are two-syllabic.

Unlike with numbers, day to day language needs to convey a larger variety of concepts hence why logograms are still needed.

Akkadian is also commonly using logograms as word classifier (e.g to indicate geographical locations, gender, type of object and many other things[1]).

Edit: to circle back, you said: How are emoji different from other logograms?

Aren't Kinagrams and Logotype Arban forms of logograms, like Chinese characters or Kanji?

In addition, Akkadian used cuneiform not only for phonemic writing, but also had many signs borrowed as-is from Sumerian as logograms (sumerograms), e.g.

It is not possible to replace logograms like Chinese completely with phonograms like Hanyu Pinyin or English without considering the grammar and the culture.

Other than the extra difficulties of logograms vs phonograms, another barrier is that one need to translate the fast writings back to "normal" ones for easy reads later.

What once took scholars painstaking years of decoding complex logograms and syntax now gets a digital boost, with NLP stepping in and saying, "Let’s breeze through these ancient texts like it’s a weekend crossword puzzle."

Logograms represent actual words in a language, as opposed to emoji which don't have a conventional mapping to words (unless you consider the unicode character names such mappings, which is odd since most users don't have any idea what the character names are).