From: Chris Harvey (chris@languagegeek.com)
Date: Mon Sep 18 2006 - 10:15:10 CDT
On Sat, 16 Sep 2006 12:15:47 -0400, Philippe Verdy <verdy_p@wanadoo.fr>
wrote:
> Yes it's certainly poor to adopt an ABCDEF layout for products made with
> most European languages, simply because it is perturbating for people
> that are trained on lots of keyboards now with the conventional layout.
> it is poor also to see keyboards whose keys are aligned in a rectangular
> grid (because you loose the sensitive feeling that helps keeping the
> fingers aligned on the correct row, and helps correcting the position of
> fingers in case of small deviations). Anyway, those layouts are not made
> to input English text easily.
• For example, the Salish keyboard places the “a” on the key left of the
number 1. For one of the most common letters in the language to be placed
on a difficult key is poor design.
• I would presume that everyone in the Salish-Kutenai community who uses a
computer does 90+% of their work in English. Native people across North
America are already very familiar with QWERTY (English or Canadian French)
and I would imagine a fair number of those are touch-typists. A radically
different keyboard design just adds one more (unneccesary) element of
difficulty for those learning these endangered languages.
• The Kutenai in Canada already use a QWERTY based layout for their
language.
Chris Harvey
-- Cenedl heb iaith, cenedl heb galon ᑭᑕᐢᑭᓇᐤ ᑳᓀᓱᐏᑌᐦᐃᓇᑿᐣ, ᑮᐢᐱᐣ ᐊᔨᐣᑐ ᐱᑭᐢᑵᐏᐣ ᐘᓂᑎᔭᐦᑭ᙮ (A nation without its language is a nation without its heart - Welsh Proverb) www.languagegeek.com www.indigenous-language.org
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.5 : Mon Sep 18 2006 - 10:19:53 CDT