--- In qalam@yahoogroups.com, "Nicholas Bodley" <nbodley@...> wrote:

> With that in mind,
> I'm quite curious (especially as a Dvorak-layout user) whether most of
> these keyboard layouts are based in some reasonable fashion on the
> language(s), such as placing the most-commonly-typed characters in the
> middle row in a sensible order.
>
> What I dearly hope is not so is that typical character layouts

follow the

> "qwerty/qwertz/azerty" tradition, assigning characters to

similar-sounding

> Latin letters in those layouts.

The answer seems to be no, yes and no. Thai and Tamil lay-outs bear
no resemblance to the QWERTY key-settings in the matter of phonetics,
which is enough to drive some people to define their own keyboard
mappings (perhaps Patrick Chew, who works with several scripts, will
elaborate.)

The commonest Thai lay-out, Kedmanee, does do sensible things, such as:

1. The tonemarks and the commonest vowel symbols are in the middle.

2. The commoner characters are non-shift; shift is used for the least
frequent characters. Digits are counted among the less-frequent.

3. The characters you don't want keyboard novices typing by mistake
are unmarked, namely the two /kh/ letters that aren't used in words
(I'm not sure about car registration marks) and the lakkhangyao
part-vowel symbol. (That may just be an idiosyncrasy of my keyboard,
though I've a feeling the two /kh/ letters don't have an official
position.)

However, following the QWERTY tradition, there is a more ergonomic
keyboard layout, Pattachote, which is far less commonly used.

Richard.