At 13:35 -0400 2005-08-22, Peter T. Daniels wrote:

>Do you really not see that you're requiring the
>billions of non-roman-users in the world to
>change their lifelong habits -- and their
>centuries or millennia of cultural tradition --
>for your convenience?

I didn't invent Pinyin, or Pinyin-romanized input
for Chinese. I didn't invent Roma-ji input for
Japanese. The Japanese did that. I didn't devise
the QWERTY-based keyboards for Devanagari or
Arabic or Hebrew. Apple did that.

I did devise QWERTY-based keyboards for Inuktitut
and Cherokee, alongside other keyboards. Both
have their uses.

I have devised a QWERTY-based Vai keyboard which
seems to work very well. A non-QWERTY-based Vai
keyboard would be hard pressed to give users
access to 294 characters plus digits and ASCII
punctuation without deadkeys (since 48 x 4 =
192). Moreover, Vai speakers (who number 105,000)
live in a country whose official language is
English, so it's not as though the Latin script
is unknown to them. A QWERTY-based keyboard for
Vai would hardly be a curse upon them.

>Shift was devised for a particular quirk of
>contemporary roman, cyrillic, and greek.

Shift was long used in other traditions. For
Arabic shaping fragments, for instance. The 1962
Standard Hindi Typewriter used shift states to
access half-forms in some instances (MA, M-) and
different letters in others (U, TTA; DA, DDA).

>Option isn't used for any ordinary English
>characters, and Shift-Option is an immense
>imposition on the typist.

Façade, naïve, résumé. All English words
correctly spelled with diacritical marks. In
Ireland we use option for áéíóú and shift-option
for ÁÉÍÓÚ and this causes no particular hardship.
(I say this as one who typesets books in Irish
regularly.)
--
Michael Everson * http://www.evertype.com