Keyboards are still the most common man-machine interface and still cause most people grief of various kinds, ranging from inability to use all ten fingers to type fast and without mistakes, all the way to tendinitis. But it would be unfair to suggest that they haven’t evolved at all. They now represent their countries of origin in all their linguistic and typographic complexity.
Here are some examples. The Turkish language has two i’s: one with a dot over it, which has the sound of the long e (as in the English word feet) and one without the dot, which is a schwa, to use the linguistic term for it. The catch is that the undotted i occupies the spot where you would expect to find the ordinary dotted i on a “normal” QWERTY keyboard used in English speaking countries. The dotted i is just to the left of the enter key (see the figure below).
Figure 1: Keyboard layout for the Turkish language (Image source: http://www.turkishlanguage.co.uk/pics/smallqwerty.jpg )
This figure also shows the umlauts on the u and the o, the cedillas or hooks beneath the c (in common with French and Portuguese), and the hacek or inverted hat over the g, which softens its sound to the point that it almost vanishes.
And, staying with Continental languages that use Roman scripts, there is Polish, which uses cedillas on other letters such as e and a, as well as acute accents, dots and bars, both horizontal and inclined, as diacritic marks (see figure 2).
Figure 2: Keyboard layout for the Polish language. (Image source: http://www.terena.org/activities/multiling/ml-mua/test/img/kbd_polish.gif )
So, you might legitimately ask, how do keyboard designers accommodate these extra letters, phonetic wiggles, curlicues and so on. The figures above would lead you to deduce, correctly, that although the basic QWERTY layout of “normal English” keyboards is maintained, all the other special characters are moved around as the designer sees fit, motivated in part by the frequency of occurrence of the nonstandard symbols. Frequently used symbols can be typed using just one keystroke, while less frequent symbols are mapped to “chords” or sequences of keys that must be pressed simultaneously. The chord solution usually involves the use of the Alt (from Alternate) key, which when pressed, endows each of the usual QWERTY keys with an alternate symbolic value that appears on the key in a smaller font or sometimes in a different color.
In all this diversity, there is, however, one surprisingly consistent choice of “displaced” symbol: the all important character @, which you need for e-mail addresses that your mail program has not stored. The figures above illustrate this well: in the Turkish keyboard, the @ has migrated from its usual place above the numeral 2, to a spot below Q, while in the Polish keyboard, it has been demoted further, to a spot below V. And that’s not all. It is usually not obvious how (i.e., using what combination of keystrokes) you type @. In fact, in my travels, I have sometimes had to resort to copying and pasting the @ from a mail header into the address box. There is, of course, always an official way to do things. For example, on the Turkish keyboard you should type the chord Alt Gr + Q to get @. And what pray is Alt Gr? Alas, nothing to do with a disgruntled Turk by the name of Altug: the abbreviation stands for Alternate Graphics, a fact that you can read more about in the excellent Wikipedia article on the Alt Gr key.
You might be wondering, at this point, why anyone would go to the trouble of using local (nonstandard) keyboards when you could just use your own laptop, from the comfort of your hotel room. At different times, I have had different reasons. Traveling light and not wanting to carry a laptop, not wanting to deal with the complications of getting or paying for a wireless connection (for example, you could get a free wireless connection in most airports today, but you usually need to have a cell phone and a large amount of patience, neither of which I have), and finally, on the positive side, wanting to see the grungy but democratic cyber hotspots (not cafes!), where ordinary people who are on the poorer side of the digital divide go to apply for jobs, type CVs, chat with boyfriends or girlfriends in unattainable first world or Eastern European locations, play war games online, do research on the history of Ukrainian tractors and such.
All of this doesn’t even begin to get into the complexities of using Roman QWERTY keyboards to type those Asian languages that are phonetic (hence approximately transliteratable into Roman script) but use a different character set. And then, of course, there are the languages based on ideograms, such as Chinese and Japanese, which would require a separate essay and one that I am not qualified to write (but watch this), except to mention that an even more painful popup menu-driven technique, called Input Method Editor is used. But I will say a little about typing Bengali on QWERTY keyboards, using True Type Fonts for Word, designed by intrepid Bangladeshis and Indians, in order to be able to write in the beautiful Devanagiri script.
The difficulties in typing are many and I will describe the main ones. The character set is much larger (32 consonants and 11 vowels). In addition, the Bengali alphabet is a syllabic alphabet in which vowels can be written as independent letters, or by using a variety of diacritical marks which are written above or below, and before or after the consonant they belong to. Finally, when consonants occur together in clusters, special conjunct letters are used, and the symbols or letters for the consonants other than the final one are truncated or modified in some way. (see examples here.) Let me explain the particular subtlety of the diacritical mark corresponding to a vowel being written before the consonant it belongs to. In most languages written using the Roman alphabet, letters are written in exactly the order that they are pronounced. Thus LI represents a sound in which the letter L is pronounced before the letter I. However, in Bengali, the letter I could represent a short vowel and, in this case, would be written before the consonant L in the Devanagiri script. In short, this means that if you were using a QWERTY keyboard mapped to the Bengali script, you would type IL instead of LI.
After this elaborate description, you might imagine that the complexities are such that no one would really be able to use such a keyboard. Wrong! My father was already into his eighties when he mastered one such keyboard system for Bengali and this year, just a few months short of his ninetieth birthday, has just completed a translation of Rabindranath Tagore’s two volume, 600 page plus, opus called Shobdo Tattvo, which explains the intricacies of the Bengali language, from linguistic, phonetic and cultural points of view. The manuscript, by its nature, even in translation, calls for the insertion of phrases and words in the Bangla script. My father did all this using software called iLEAP, created by CDAC (India’s Centre for Development of Advanced Computing), and billed as an intelligent, Internet ready, Indian language word processor. Of course, as one might expect, even though the look and feel of iLEAP is like that of Microsoft’s Word, the two are not compatible. So the latest mission, in order to publish this translation on the web under a Creative Commons License [1], is to produce a PDF version of the two volume opus. An intermediate step in doing this is to translate the parts of the manuscript which are in Bengali script to a font known as Bangla 21st February font. The date, proclaimed in 1999 as the International Mother Language Day by UNESCO, originated as the international recognition of Language Movement Day, which has been commemorated in Bangladesh (formerly East Pakistan) since 1952, when a number of Dhaka university students were killed by the Pakistani police and army in Dhaka during the Bengali Language Movement. The date became a symbol of the Bangladeshi struggle for linguistic and political independence. The significance of this is that it is perhaps the only example of a language so venerated by its speakers that they actually fought and won a war of independence against an occupying power, in order to have the right to continue speaking it. The slogan of the times was Joy Bangla, meaning Victory to Bangla, used for both the country and the language, and this is as good a slogan and story to end on as any.
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