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Comment by pintxo | Hacker News Reader

What is a standard keyboard, anyway? As a native German, I am accustomed to my local „standard“ keyboard. So, no one prevents them from defining a standard keyboard for their new language.

And, as someone brought it up, on smartphones your options are basically limmitless, with the option to fully customize the keyboard as it‘s all virtual.

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That's a privilege of big countries like Germany, although Kazakhstan might qualify as well. I live in Estonia, a country of 1.3 million, and although there is a standard Estonian keyboard layout, there's basically zero products using it. [1] The local stores primarily sell laptops and desktop keyboards with the US ANSI layout. This is especially annoying, because ISO layouts like Swedish, UK, or even German would be a closer match to the Estonian standard. I also fear that this is impacting how many young people get into programming, because the Estonian layout binds three essential programming characters < > | to a key which physically doesn't exist on the US ANSI keyboard. I've seen it in practice how a friend tried to learn programming with his US ANSI keyboard, by copy-pasting those characters when needed. Not exactly an optimal situation. [2]

[1] Most keyboards had the Estonian layout in early 2000s, but they soon rapidly lost market share, mostly due to laptops if I had to guess why.

[2] Why not use US ANSI layout in the OS to match the keyboard? Because it doesn't contain characters required to type Estonian words.

> Why not use US ANSI layout in the OS to match the keyboard? Because it doesn't contain characters required to type Estonian words.

You can use dead keys and character combinations to get characters the keyboard doesn't support directly. This is what's done in France, where the standard AZERTY keyboard doesn't have keys for every French letter. For some letters it also only has a lowercase version, not uppercase. (Accents are optional on uppercase letters in French because... who knows why.) There is a dedicated key for the letter ù though, which only appears in a single word of the French language.

> Accents are optional on uppercase letters

Unlike what some french believe, they are not supposed to be optional:

http://www.academie-francaise.fr/questions-de-langue#5_stron...

With both MacOS and Linux, you can access all accented uppercase letters simply by using the Caps-Lock key. For some unfathomable reason, Windows makes it much more difficult.

> Accents are optional on uppercase letters

In spanish it used to be the same. Old printing technologies were not so flexible as a screen, so for large imprints it made more sense to have all letters be the same size whilst not wasting space above the letters.

> I've seen it in practice how a friend tried to learn programming with his US ANSI keyboard, by copy-pasting those characters when needed.

Couldn't your friend use trigraphs (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digraphs_and_trigraphs) in place of these characters?

Note that C and C++ digraphs and trigraphs require < and > as part of the `token`.

Why can't you switch to US layout when coding and switch back to Estonian when writing Estonian text?

I speak Spanish and have a laptop with a US keyboard. There's a similar issue with the <> key. I tried switching all the time at first, but it's a pain in the ass. Eventually I remapped right alt+Z to < and right alt+X to >. It took me an entire afternoon to figure out how to do it on Ubuntu, and I'm pretty sure it can't be done on Windows. So yeah, not exactly a solution for everyone

I find it nuts that numbers are unmodified but delimiters like that are not when I mostly use my (US ANSI macOS layout) keyboard for front end coding. My fix was space cadet modifiers. Tapping left/right shift produces opening/closing parenthesis, command does curly braces, and option does angle brackets. Also caps lock is control but tapping it is double quote. You may find with this approach that you have way more keys at your fingertips than you thought.

For Windows, there is the Microsoft Keyboard Layout Creator[1], which would allow you to create such a mapping. I used it to map AltGr+s to ß on a Finnish/Swedish keyboard since I found myself writing a decent amount of German.

[1] https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=223...

It's not a pain in the ass (at least in windows) because there is an OS setting that lets each window remember its keyboard layout. So I don't have to switch very often. The coding windows use US layout and my chat windows use GR (Greek) layout.

> What is a standard keyboard, anyway?

One that has exactly the letters that can appear in a passport's machine-readable field.

I have lots of funny accented characters in my name, and I have lived in several countries under several different names adjusted to the local officials' keyboards. And don't even get me started on forms saying "your name exactly as in your passport, but also without any funny letters".

If there is a realistic chance of writing Kazakh (names) in 7-bit-ASCII-only letters, they should go for it.

They could also use two different but equally valid writing systems. Norway has two different official written languages that both sort of correspond to the same spoken language. AFAIR in former Yugoslavia both Latin and Cyrillic were written, I remember a friend telling me that in school they alternated between Latin and Cyrillic weeks.

Yes, in YU they used both. It was localized to member states tho. Croatia used mostly Latin, and Serbs used mostly Cyrillic. They often were able to read and write both non the less.

-As for the two written Norwegian languages, they both utilize the same letters and are, by and large, more like two different accents than distinct languages.

One (Bokmål) is loosely based on Danish (language of the ruling elite up until 1814), adapted to resemble the way Norwegians for the most part spoke, while the other (Nynorsk) was pretty much based on rural dialects.

Nynorsk does make (slightly!) more use of diacritics than bokmål, but most current nynorsk users skip them in daily correspondence; their use is not mandatory. ('too', for instance, being written 'også' in bokmål and 'ôg' in nynorsk.)

Also, both versions of Norwegian uses our funny letters æ/Æ (ae, similar-sounding to a in 'bad'), ø/Ø (oe, similar-sounding to ea in 'heard') and å/Å (aa, similar to 'a' in saw).

Disclaimer: I am an engineer, not a linguist. There are probably some inaccuracies in the above, but it should get you through the next linguist pub quiz without causing embarrassment.

It probably means the keyboards people in Kazakhstan already have. Which I assume is a Cyrillic keyboard, which can also do Latin script but does not have keys for umlauts and such.

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