[darby_eight]

> On a character level this should be trivial.

Characters are not the semantic components of words—these are syllables. Generally speaking, anyway. I've got to imagine this approach would yield higher quality results than the roman alphabet. I'm curious if this could be tested by just looking at how LLMs handle English vs Chinese.

[inbetween]

The minimal semantic parts of words are morphemes. Syllables are phonological units (roughly: the minimal unit for rhythmic purposes such as stress, etc)

[darby_eight]

Only in languages that have morphemes! This is hardly a universal attribute of language so much as an attribute of those that use an alphabet to encode sounds. It makes more sense to just bypass the encoding and directly consider the speech.

Besides, considering morphemes as semantic often results in a completely different meaning than we actually intend. We aren't trying to train a chatbot to speak in prefixes and suffixes, we're trying to train a chatbot to speak in natural language, even if it is encoded to latin script before output.