--- In qalam@yahoogroups.com, Michael Everson <everson@...> wrote:

> At 18:26 -0400 2005-08-21, Peter T. Daniels wrote:
>
> > > Whoa! Unicode responds to language communities. There is no doubt
> > > about that. The problem is that language communities are complex
> > > entities.
> >
> >But one of Unicode's principals says they have to do romanization.
>
> I said no such thing, if I am the principal you refer to. I said that
> QWERTY is useful, and it is. There is QWERTY input available for
> Japanese, Chinese, Devanagari, Arabic, Hebrew, Cherokee, Armenian,
> Greek, and Inuktitut in the Mac OS. This is useful to many people.
> There are also other keyboard layouts available for these scripts,
> for people who may prefer that. (Not for Greek, which uses QWERTY as
> a standard.)

Aren't the concepts of QWERTY input rather different for Japanese,
Chinese, Cherokee and Inuktitut on one hand and for Devanagari,
Arabic, Hebrew and Aremenian on the other? In the former case an
essentially alphabetic sequence is being used to represent a
non-alphabetic script. In the other, it's just a re-arrangement of
the keys, no different in principle from QWERTY v. Dvorak for English,
or Kedmanee v. Pattachote for Thai.

Incidentally, is there anything that can claim to be a standard QWERTY
input for Thai? I'm typing on a Thai keyboard now (labelled for
Kedmanee and US QWERTY, badged as Samsung, made in China and bought in
Bangkok), but if I use a standard keyboard map the keys I press for
Thai bear no relationship to the QWERTY lay-out, unless you count
partial mnemonics like BIRPYA.

For the interested reader:
BIRPYA =
Press B for sara i.
Press I for ro ruea.
Press R for pho phan.
Press P for yo yak.
Press Y for mai hanakat.

Only two keys correspond: capital C for cho ching, and capital T for
tho thong. The kedmanee keyboard is designed to minimise the use of
the shift key, so clearly these are not particularly useful
coincidences. Perhaps I exaggerate - the keypad is the same, and even
gives you the normal digits, rather than the Thai digits.

As far as I am aware, Thai programmers need to learn two keyboard
layouts, one for Thai and one for the Roman alphabet.

I remember Patrick Chew saying he was writing his own keyboard
mappings because he was fed up with having to remember different
keyboard mappings for different SE Asian scripts.

Richard.