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Japanese/Chinese only “fit” in 140 because of the way they count “characters”. 280 for alphabetic languages seems roughly equivalent.
by xenadu02 9y ago
Japanese/Chinese only “fit” in 140 because of the way they count “characters”.
280 for alphabetic languages seems roughly equivalent.
- seanmcdirmid 9y agoA Chinese character is much more dense than two roman letters. When I was texting in china during the SMS phase, I got around 16 or maybe 20 characters before it was broken into extra messages.
- TazeTSchnitzel 9y ago…huh? It should be able to fit 70 characters (70 UCS-2 characters is 140 bytes, which is the SMS message limit).
- seanmcdirmid 9y agoNo way. Maybe someone Chinese knows the limit better, but I definitely couldn't send a 70 character message without it having been broken up into 3 or 4 texts.
- betterunix2 9y agoIn the interest of being fair, let's compare bytes: 日日是好日 (15 bytes) Every day is a good day (23 bytes) It's not just how one counts "characters;" some languages are written more compactly than others. I would not be surprised if Hebrew is also a bit more compact than English, as it is typically written without vowels.