Oh, forgot to tell you how to get there:
Tools —> Options —> Content —> Advanced —> Character Encoding.
Hmm, just Googling around...
Big Endian and Little Endian have to do with byte sequencing. I have no clue what that means as far as what the difference would be between picking Little Endian character encoding vs. Big Endian or any other Unicode or Western encoding scheme for that matter.
I figure that you at least want to stick with either Western or Unicode though, and not something like Vietnamese encoding (obviously).