In which way are Egyptian hieroglyphs and their hieratic form [1] not an alphabet? There is a huge number of ligatures and some determinatives, but that's an ad-on. You can use the single characters like any other alphabet.
By that logic we also don't use an alphabet because we have started using symbols like the smiley. Which non-phonemic symbol have they used that couldn't be replaced by a phonemically created word?
Hieroglyphs include some alphabetic elements, but itâs not an alphabetic system. There are no significant historical texts written in it purely alphabetically. If you wrote out a complete text spelling out the words usually represented logographically in phonetic form theyâd have thought youâd gone mad. Nobody used it that way.
Sure you will find some places where hieroglyphs are referred to as âan alphabetâ, such as in childrens books, but weâre talking about the historical development of writing systems. We canât do that accurately without distinguishing clearly between different types of writing systems, and this is well established terminology.
Youâre probably right about emoji. Oxford Dictionaries named an emoji the âword of the yearâ in 2015.
E.g. hn: đ đ.
[1] https://www.omniglot.com/writing/egyptian_hieratic.htm