I feel like ever since the printing technology became more available, the pace of evolution of languages has slowed down. I thought computers would help with that, because they provide a dynamic way to exchange and communicate ideas. But here we are, decades after the invention of the first computer, and for programming we still rely on the QWERTY keyboard that wasn’t even invented for ease of use.
P.S: typos and errors are due to voice dictation.
This reminds me of the "universality" of the genetic code. That is, the "language" for translation of genetic information to proteins is pretty uniform (there are some exceptions). The obvious reason for why this "language" doesn't change is that even the tiniest changes will cause problems for the organism (several thousand genes depend on the legacy genetic code and if it changes, that could = death). As others have noted here, we have created niche writing methods like stenography, which would be analogous to non-canonical genetic code in mitochondria, for example (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_mitochondrial_genetics#G...). One can imagine that the mitochondrial genetic code can evolve away from the "universal" code because the mitochondrial code has fewer users (genes) depending on its legacy code.
I think, in a similar vein, once modern printing got everyone on the same page (ahem), we were sort of "locked in" and even minor changes would break a lot of already functioning communication.
I guess the question also reminds me of software engineers who don't want to mess with a decades-old legacy codebase for fear of breaking things that they are unaware of.
That being said, I imagine it could be done (creating a more efficient, widely used language/writing method), but it would take a LOT of effort.
If there is some frequently–used icon for downloads, you would have to convince everyone to use it, update all the fonts to include it, update all the keyboards to type it, etc. Meanwhile the rest of us will just be over here typing out "download" instead. The beauty of an alphabet is that anyone can compose a new sequence of letters and they automatically have a new word! Nobody has to ask permission, or convince anyone, or add characters to their fonts, or provide justification to the Unicode committee.
In principle you could add letters to the alphabet, but would that really be more efficient? Maybe words could start using fewer letters drawn from a larger set, but the storage requirements for a given any given piece of text would likely remain the same. After all, the computer already translates everything we type into binary, which is just an alphabet with only two characters. Each character that we type becomes 8 or more of these binary bits. Adding letters to the alphabet will just mean that we use more bits for every character. Plus there's still the problem of updating all the fonts, and keyboards, and textbooks, and teaching everyone about the new letters.
Meanwhile the rest of us can just compose the letters we have into new arrangements as often as we please. Perhaps you should search for "spelling reform" and read about all the past failures to change how we write before you jump to the conclusion that it would be an obvious improvement. See also "Shannon information theory".
Perhaps your question might be better "why haven't more efficient systems gained wider adoption," and there's a large "installed base" etc but also some hidden values to the inefficiencies that might not be apparent at first glance.
There’s no reason why we couldn’t all be speaking/writing/reading our own augmented natural languages that our devices just translate and render to any other language. I’ve been working on this problem space for about a year and down the road I plan on writing base dialect called “Namilang”.
If yes, ask yourself why it (or other similar "featural" systems) are not dominating other "less efficient/expressive" systems like Latin Alphabet.
As for verbal communication you could look up the Esperanto movement/language.
Perhaps you'd like Chinese, that use ideograms instead of letters. 下载 (using Google translator)