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Presumably that derives from the overhead of encoding an english character as a full byte? Given there's only 26 characters normally, you could fit that into 5 bits instead, which funnily enough does actually line up with the chinese character encoding (5x5 vs 1x24).

Yes. It's the non-Latin alphabets that lose with either UTF-8 or UTF-16, compared with stateful ISO 2022 page switching.

True, but even then you wouldn’t want to store it egregiously badly.