Richard Wordingham wrote:

>
> --- 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.

The keyboards that come with Ecological fonts are intended for Western
users so they're mapped by transliteration-equivalent as far as that is
practicable, and they take full advantage of the Shift and Option keys
and delayed-output sequencing (like getting é from Opt-e - e).

I have a couple of volumes with typewriter keyboard layouts -- Olympia,
which made quite a few exotic machines, though I don't remember whether
there are any SEA ones; and Remington (my father sold Remingtons in the
1940s), which had a few.
--
Peter T. Daniels grammatim@...