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From: elman@sdamos.ling.ucsd.edu (Jeff Elman)
Newsgroups: comp.unix.wizards
Subject: Re: byte != 8 bits
Message-ID: <3566@sdcsvax.UCSD.EDU>
Date: Sat, 1-Aug-87 13:01:08 EDT
Article-I.D.: sdcsvax.3566
Posted: Sat Aug  1 13:01:08 1987
Date-Received: Sun, 2-Aug-87 09:52:27 EDT
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Reply-To: elman@amos.ling.ucsd.edu (Jeff Elman)
Organization: Univ. of Calif., San Diego
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One of the arguments people have advanced in favor of "bigger bytes"
is to accommodate a broader diversity of character sets. 8-bit byters 
have been accused of being lingua-centric (or worse) by assuming that 
8-bits suffice for all characters.  Kanji is usually mentioned as a
counter-example.

I'm a little confused about this argument.  While Kanji are often
called "characters", they're not characters in the sense most people
probably understand.  Kanji are ideograms, and  Kanji characters (or 
character pairs) correspond to what we think of as words.  Is the proposal 
thus that  bytes should be capable of transmitting entire words?  That 
hardly seems reasonable.  

Or have I missed something?

Jeff Elman
Linguistics/UCSD
elman@amos.ling.ucsd.edu