Saturday, August 31, 2013

Typographical

Lots of people probably know that the traditional keyboards on our computers are descended from those on typewriters, with the most common being called "QWERTY" for the first six letters on the top row. This particular keyboard design came about as a way to decrease the possibility the metal typewriter arms would jam when struck in too quickly in succession.

Touch-typing methods were developed to teach the way to type without looking at these keys and also speed up typing. Which means that the QWERTY keyboard is pretty much engrained in our modern machines, even though today a key doesn't move a metal arm and striking the letters too quickly doesn't necessarily mean a jam on your computer keyboard. Periodically people will advocate for a better design, but the near universality of QWERTY usually means they are niche layouts at best.

Some parts of the world use different configurations, and the good folk at Mental Floss review a few of them here. These aren't places where entirely different alphabets mean different keys altogether, like Arabic or Hebrew or the katagana characters of many Asian languages. Hebrew, for example, has letters that represent sounds that the Latin alphabet may use two letters to show. Latin alphabets use "sh," for example, to designate the sound that children across the country are becoming reaccustomed to hearing as school starts. But in Hebrew, that sound is represented by the letter shin, or "ש." A Hebrew font loaded onto a machine with a regular Latin keyboard, QWERTY or otherwise, will probably put the shin on the "w" key because of the resemblance, since the "s" key will be occupied by the letter sin, which looks exactly like shin except for a differently-placed dot that the Blogger interface can't, apparently, represent.

Read anything written in French and you will notice that accent marks are a lot more common. Same with Spanish. French-speaking countries modify the QWERTY layout primarily by using a couple of different symbols in the number row and inverting the shift function. While we type the number and use shift to get a symbol, the "AZERTY"  keyboard types the symbol, which is often one of the accented vowels. You have to shift to get the number.

No. 6, or the "JCUKEN" layout, does feature a lot of different characters since it uses the Russian Cyrillic alphabet. Cyrillic is a mixture of the Latin alphabet and some modified characters from the old Slavic alphabet.

Of course, all of the most up-to-date keyboards with the most efficient and ergonomic designs in the world can't keep people from writing stupid stuff. See any congressional mailing or three-fifths of what goes into the editorial page of any major newspaper for examples.

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