OT : Qwerty variants

On Sunday 02 February 2003 01:48 pm, Sarah Marie Parker-Allen wrote:
> The standard Micro$oft Russian keyboard is totally off of the English one.
> I plan to eventually buy an official keyboard, but until I get that or the
> stickers it was going to be next to impossible to remember which keys were
> which (some of the letters are on punctuation keys, even; Russian has more
> than 26 letters).  Solution?  I went and downloaded a phonetic keyboard
> layout and replaced the one in my Windows folder.  Now all I have to
> remember are a few letters (sh, chsh, yu, eh, yo, the soft and hard signs)
> that aren't on letter keys at all, and three or four that aren't on the key
> you'd expect (y -- the upside-down n with a hat, as we said in my first
> Russian class -- is on j).  Raised my typing speed significantly.
        Agreed; since I'm using Linux (although this applies to anything running X),
I just swapped the key assignments so there is a closer 1-1 symbolism. Where
there is no direct English equivalent, I use shape correspondence; hence, w =
ш (sh), h = ч (ch) (See, it's an upside down "h"), x = х, etc. Then for those
that neither match shape nor sound, I resort to the number row, which even
then has some sense. For щ (shch), since it is close in shape to ш (sh), I
use 2; 3 and 4 are respectively э (e) and ё (jo), since they are close to е
(je). 6 is ь (soft sign) because of shape correspondence, so 5 is �  (hard
sign) because of position. 7, because it is close to у (u), is ю (ju), and 8,
because it is close to и (i) is й (j).
        The only difficulties I have experienced with this layout is my habitual
swapping of b with v and c with s; when I want to type все (vsje) I sometimes
type бце (btsje).
        :Peter

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