&gt; 2. Paper and pen (the surfer example) also have technological constraints. It&#x27;s a &quot;2D&quot; surface, width of line, etc.<p>This is true, but it&#x27;s kind of true in the same way that walking and flying both have movement constraints. Flying certainly has limitations, but just like pen &amp; paper give you more flexibility in composition than entering a string of characters, flying offers much more freedom of movement than walking.<p>&gt; 4. What about non-alphabetic written languages?<p>Most (all?) current non-alphabetic orthographies are non-pictographic. While many characters for common words may have started that way, the majority of characters in these systems are nowadays not obvious pictorial representations of their meaning.<p>It&#x27;s possible that this will eventually be the case with emoji, too, but currently it&#x27;s not.