Does anyone happen to know what the arguments for big-endianness versus little-endianness in the Unicode format were?

I've never really understood the advantage of one over the other, but this section on Wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Endianness#Optimization helps explain that there are optimizations that can be made at a hardware level when performing arithmetic on little-endianness values.

Is the argument for using LE in Unicode similar?