Re: OE diphthongs/breaking (was: Re: Germanic vowel correspondences (was: Scots.))

Mark J. Reed wrote:
> On Tue, Jul 22, 2008 at 10:05 PM, Tristan McLeay <conlang@...> wrote:
>> The greatest key ever invented for the computer keyboard
>> has surely got to be the Compose key aka Multi key, which lets you make
>> ae ligatures my typing the sequence compose, a, e or a-acute by typing
>> compose, a, apostrophe (kindof it turns the next key you type into a
>> dead key). It's a real shame it's not available by default on any
>> keyboards/operating system's except Sun's.
>
> Not true.  You can do that in Linux (SCIM comes out of the box on
> Ubuntu).
I meant enabled by default, I suppose, when I said available. Sun
keyboards have a key labelled "Compose", with an associated LED (like
the caps/scroll/num lock keys, except on (some?) Sun keyboards they're
embedded in the key instead of separate). If you use Sun's operating
system then when you press the Compose key the LED comes on and you can
then type "a e" and get an ash.

On Linux if you have a Sun keyboard, you can enable this functionality,
but by default the key acts as the menu key (the one between the right
hand Windows and Ctrl keys on a PC keyboard). Also, I've never been able
to make the LED come on in Linux on my Sun keyboard.

I'm not sure what SCIM is, but you don't need any extra programs ---
there's been a setting in X11's config for as long as I can remember to
switch the menu key into a compose key. It's just that the menu key is
so useless and the compose key so useful, that I really think the
compose key should be available by default rather than firstly having to
know it exists and secondly having to actually go and enable it.

>I use the OS X "U.S. Extended" keyboard mapping, which works
> similarly, but the mappings are mnemonic instead of literal.  The
> "dead acute accent" key is option + e, presumably because that's the
> most frequent letter that gets an acute accent.  Similarly, option + u
> for diaresis/umlaut, option + a for macron, option + n for tilde.
> Grave accent is option + `, though.
Well, that's not exactly the same because you still have to know what
keys do what. That's the thing I like most about compose keys --- you
never need to memorise a rarely-used combination or check it up; as long
as you know what the letter looks like or what it sounds like, your
guess is very likely right. So "compose t h" is one way to get a thorn,
but "compose b p" also works. (There's exceptions for historical reasons
--- in particular I'm always tripped up by hyphen which means "tilde if
the result exists in Latin-1, but macron otherwise", even though macrons
don't exist in Latin-1 at all, and tilde does its job perfectly well.)

--
Tristan.