At 08:38 -0400 2005-08-23, Peter T. Daniels wrote:

> > A 48-key keyboard has a key (with §/±) to the
>> left of the 1 key and also has a key (with `/~)
>> to the left of the z key.
>
>Then what do they put in Opt-6, which is §, and S-O-=, which is ±?

It depends on the keyboard layout I suppose. On
the British and US keyboards it is both § and ±,
so there is redundancy. The Irish keyboard uses
Opt-6 for a deadkey for circumflex, though ± is
still on S-O-=.

>And in the Opt and S-O positions of the extra key?

These positions with the British key layout are
null (they produce nothing). It depends what the
people who develop the individual keyboard
drivers. There are many of those.

> > "89,500 in Liberia (1991 L. Vanderaa CRC).
> > Population total all countries: 105,000. [...]
>> Language use: 20% use English, 10% mende, 5% Gola
>> as second language. Language Development:
>> Literacy rate in second language 10%."
>>
>> What I said remains true: English is the official
>> language of Liberia, and Vais who use computers
>> will encounter it and the Latin alphabet. Indeed,
>> they must already, as surely road signs are
>> written in Latin. And computer hardware keyboards
>> they use will be engraved with QWERTY.
>
>And how many of those 89,500 Vai-speakers are among the 69,000
>English-speakers?

That data is not in the Ethnologue. The road
signs are still going to be written in Latin. All
of the Vai speakers *I* know speak English. And
doubtless many, many of them speak Liberian
English, the trade language which has 1,500,000
second-language speakers in Liberia, according to
the Ethnologue.

> > Yes, and lots of lexicographers, informed by good
>> typography and tradition, prefer façade, naïve,
>> résumé to facade. Do what thou wilt.
>
>Lexicographers do not _prefer_. They _report_.

Perhaps you've never edited a dictionary. Like
everyone, lexicographers make choices. When I
edited Nicholas William's English-Cornish
dictionary, we had to make choices. What spelling
to use as the first spelling in the headword, for
instance. Whether to include US spellings as well
as UK spellings. The answers to these questions
do not bloom out of thin air. They come, often,
from the work of other lexicographers. We checked
good practice of the Concise Oxford 1998
dictionary.

façade (also facade)
résumé (also resumé)

The Concise Oxford was inconsistent with the
other word, interestingly, with two headwords:

naïf
naive (also naïve)

For more information about the English-Cornish
dictionary, whose second edition is under
preparation, see
http://www.evertype.com/gram/ecd.html
--
Michael Everson * http://www.evertype.com