But is it fair? - An exploration of alphabets and ideograms

But then is it "fair" that English requires a whopping 19 bytes to
transmit "microencephalopathy," or even 13 bytes for the Germanic
"pinheadedness," when there's probably an efficient ideogram or two
(requiring only 6 to 8 bytes total) for the same concept in Chinese?

William J. Kammerer

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Michael Kay" <>
To: "'William J. Kammerer'" <>;
<>
Sent: Friday, 04 March, 2005 07:54 AM
Subject: RE: [xml-dev] [About Unicode] Why the symbol LOGICAL NOT is
missing from the UCS ?


> I can't comment on the usability of any alphabet other than Latin, but
> is it "fair" that Chinese ideograms chew up tens of thousands of code
> points in Unicode?

It's balanced by the unfairness that Latin letters only occupy one byte
in UTF-8, whereas Chinese ideograms occupy three or four.

Michael Kay
http://www.saxonica.com/