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Alaric B Snell wrote:
>
> Elliotte Rusty Harold wrote:
>
> >
> > One should keep in mind that Chinese and similar languages are quite
> > compressed to start with, far more so than English text is.
> For example,
> > in UTF-8 the English word "tree" takes four bytes. The
> Japanese word for
> > tree takes three bytes.
> >
>
> Good point, actually...
One moment... Until yesterday, I would almost agree with Elliotte on this,
but today I happened to travel to Korea and my impression, just by looking
at the stuff written in both English and Korean inside the airplane and
elsewhere, is that this may not be completely true. Some of the
"inscriptions" had even more characters in Korean than in English. I don't
know how much one can generalize from this very special sample, but it is
enough to make me doubt.
Alessandro
> I suppose that, in general, any
> language which
> uses more than 256 code points in general use is actually
> quite likely
> to be a language that uses one code point per word. So languages like
> Arabic, which are alphabet-based but not very compact in UTF-8 due to
> being composed of high-numbered characters (although I'm not sure how
> high so don't know if they would mainly be 2 or 3 bytes or whatever),
> would be better served by an encoding that mainly uses a shiftable
> window with single-byte characters, I guess.
>
> ABS
>
>
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