At 00:39 +0000 2005-08-22, Richard Wordingham wrote:

>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?

Not really. The point is that where you have an S you type the S key.
Where you have a P you type the P key. In the case of syllabic
scripts, The consonants are dead-keys, and no character is entered
until the vowel is entered.

>In the former case an essentially alphabetic sequence is being used
>to represent a non-alphabetic script.

So? This form of Kana input and pinyin input has been around for a
long time. The QWERTY-based keyboard for Inuktitut was made for some
software the Baffin Divisional Board of Education commissioned from
me something like a decade ago. There were non-QWERTY-based keyboards
made as well. Some typists (and non-Inuit administrators) who were
fluent in Latin preferred the QWERTY-based keyboard. Others didn't
mind switching between the two layouts.

>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.

I use QWERTY-based keyboards for all of them.
--
Michael Everson * http://www.evertype.com