Working with UTF-8 in the kernel

Well if you do this, aren't you going eventually to end up with just one letter in your alphabet? Okay, I'm being facetious, but this happened to the Roman alphabet in the ?1400s, when printing arrived. Pre-printing, the written English alphabet had a fair few more letters than 26. I'm not sure of the details, but at least one example is the replacement of thorn (looks like the Yen symbol) with Y, hence all the signs "Ye Olde Coffee Shop".

Cheers,
Wol