Re: CHAT: YAC: or more exactly: yet another conlang sketch

Roger Mills wrote:
>
> Irina wrote:
> >> I have a manual typewriter five years older than I am (from
> >> nineteen-fiftymumble) and it used to have an 'ij' key, squeezing both
> >> the 'i' and the 'j' in the same space.
>
> Robert Hailman wrote:
>  >Hmm... it does seem rather useless to have a specialised key for it. I
> >do seem to recall the Extended ASCII specification having a symbol for
> >it, but that could just be me.
>
> Au contraire. "ij" is fairly common, so it saves a key stroke.  More
> importantly, a fast touch-typist would tend to get the i and j keys tangled
> up quite frequently.  And, of course, it saves a space, if that's important.
> Ah, manual typewriters, of sainted memory........
If someone's switching i and j in "ij", it probably means they are
typing to fast for their own good.

It is faster, and it does save space, granted. It seems to me, though,
that if you can represent "ij" with two keys that already exist, there
are better things to do with the extra key, such as accents, like Irina
changed her 'ij' key to.

> Before I got a computer, the best typewriter I ever owned was a cheap-o
> electric Casio-- 4 characters per key, bold, italic, underline (at the touch
> of a button, just like now), and 2 typed pages worth of memory and an
> editing function.  You could even type without a ribbon, if you used their
> expensive thermal paper (when that, along with the ribbons, went out of
> production, I discovered big rolls of thermal fax paper, much cheaper).
Oooh, sounds like fun. I have an electric typewriter I got for $5 at a
garage sale, although I don't use it often. It does use those typeballs
that are supposedly changable, so that you can get more than one
typeface, but I don't have more than the Courier 10cpi ball that came
with the typewriter. I'd use it more if I had more than one ball.

--
Robert