The native languages of roughly half the global population isn't exactly "knotted cords from the inca empire." As for whether it can be in a layer below the tex

The native languages of roughly half the global population isn't exactly "knotted cords from the inca empire." As for whether it can be in a layer below the text editor... probably not, but even then, someone has to write it and talk about why determining "how many glyphs wide is this sequence of bytes" is an interesting question with a complex answer worthy of study. And today the answer to that question means "maintain a very large and dynamic dataset of the world's written languages" which makes it unpalatable to "low level" software, like the standard libraries of every PL that I'm aware of.