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

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........

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).