No, and it would be wrong for it to do so, because you've given it a very explicit set of instructions about what to do: "Give me the value of the byte of memory at the start of x."

To do what you're asking, you'd do something like this:

  unsigned char c = (unsigned char)x;

That will give you the low order byte of x. But to do that, on a big endian system, when you've told it to get you the byte at the base address of x, is simply wrong behavior. At least in C. I can't speak to higher level languages since I don't work in them.