--
I also spent over two full years designing the layout of a 114-key computer
keyboard necessary to accommodate the keys needed for an extra 22 letters
missing from the Roman-French-English alphabet.
--

I assume this was mostly an exercise in ergonomics, and if it wasn't, it
shoulda been.

We are largely stuck with Qwerty. Windows comes packaged with Dvorak, but
just about no one uses it. Most of us have learned all about right-alt.

Keyboarding is now largely a matter of software, and not hardware. And all
keyboarding is still tied to Qwerty.

Discussing the 42 phonemes of English, and the impossible-to-achieve
spelling reform that would require 42 letters, ignores all the other
languages of the world, and the equally gargantuan task of making all
letters of all alphabets (I define 'alphabet' in the terms of Daniels and
Bright) immediately touch-typeable. Gee. 42 English letters are fine, but I
also want to do runes, Georgian and Devanagri too. If you download and play
around with SCI Unipad, you get an idea of the enormousness of the issue.

Piotr, of course, touch types in three alphabetic supersets (Roman, Cyrillic
and Greek, along with the subset of Polish Roman, and the diacritics of all
the Roman-based orthographies -- plus IPA!). I wouldn't be suprised if he
could do a good backwards job with fully-pointed Arabic or Hebrew too.
UniPad has just added the Cherokee syllabary, and I imagine Piotr is
learning that too (I'm still trying to figure out if a tonos equals a
breathing in Greek).

It's putting DeCartes before DiVorce. Only when we can right-alt our way
through most of the world's letters, will we be ready to fix the damn
keyboard.








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