In a bidi environment. whether you select a US 101 QWERTY or a Dvorak, I think
it is fair for the application to assume you intend to type English and left to
right. When you select a Yiddish keyboard, it is fair for the application to
assume you intend to type Yiddish and right to left. Of course you COULD type
other languages in either case, and the software should allow you to specify
your defaults or override them.
In a Hebrew context, language switching between English and Hebrew is frequent,
because it is common practice is to write English loan words and phrases in
English, especially in technical writing.
The locale concept does not adequately support this case, it is monolingual.
While the general case should be supported, I believe it is also important to
support the common usage. A specialist should be able to use things even when
the terminology is not to his liking, but for common use the terminology should
be meaningful to the non-expert.
Therefore I think we should stick with "keyboard language".
Jony
> -----Original Message-----
> From: unicode-bounce@unicode.org
> [mailto:unicode-bounce@unicode.org]On Behalf Of Edward Cherlin
> Sent: Friday, May 11, 2001 7:19 AM
> To: unicode@unicode.org
> Subject: RE: Keyboard terminology
>
>
> At 11:59 PM +0300 5/10/01, Jonathan Rosenne wrote:
> >With Windows in many cases it is definitely a language.
>
> Microsoft distinguishes clearly between different keyboard layouts
> and locales for the same language.
>
> >You select which
> >keyboard languages you want, and you switch them either with the
> mouse or with
> >Alt-Shift. The system already knows which keyboard layout you have -
> 101 in my
> >case - and offers several choices.
>
> That may well work for you, but we are speaking of the general case,
> where users of a language may require a choice of keyboard layouts
> and even of writing systems for the same language, and in the extreme
> case may have more than one physical keyboard attached.
>
...
> --
>
> Edward Cherlin
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