Re: Other European languages on a US keyboard [OT]
Yakov Lerner wrote: On 7/24/06, A.J.Mechelynck [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: The French have used accented letters since (IIUC) before Gutenberg invented printing. While Antonie helps us with bits of history, I thought I'd ask this. I was on irc chat, and somehow the issue of French using a lot of silent letters came up. For example, Peugeot is 7 letters but 4 sounds. I don't speak French, but the tendency is there. Somebody explained that in middle ages, literacy was rare, and scribes were paid by letters written; and scribes would artificially inflate number of letter. Does this explanation hold water ? I know that generally in other languages, the silent letters are artifact of past real sounds that are preserved due to conservatism of orthography. Was if different in French ? Yakov In the Middle Ages, scribes weren't paid commercially (I think): they were monks and had their share in their convent's table and bed. Payment was to the convent, maybe by the thickness of the book, maybe according to the beauty of illustrations (and decorated letters), maybe according to how long it took to read the story aloud, I don't rightly know. Or else maybe some copists were attached to some nobleman's court, and wrote, copied or decorated books in return for being lodged, fed, clad, and generally cared for. I guess many small letters wouldn't have fetched very much more than slightly fewer, but slightly bigger, letters. French orthography has been largely fixed at some point of the Middle Ages (12th century?), but French pronunciation, like English pronunciation, has continued to evolve since then. Just like English spelling does not reflect the Great Vowel Shift, French spelling still uses letters that belong in the etymology, ceased to be pronounced at some point in the past, but reappear in the feminine or in liaison: un grand monsieur -- no liaison, the d in grand is silent un grand homme -- liaison, the d is sounded [t] une grande femme -- feminine, before unvoiced consonant, -de is sounded [t] une grande maison -- feminine, before voiced consonant, -de is sounded [d] elle est grande -- feminine, before pause, [d] une grand-mère -- compound, frozen before the adjective (from Lat. grandis in both genders) acquired -e in the feminine: no liaison, -d is silent. la grandeur -- derived word, with [d] pronounced. There are many such cases, also e.g. with verbs, or with plurals where the -s (from the Latin accusative plural) has remained sounded only in liaison. IIUC, at least some linguists say that those silent letters are not artifacts, but reflect phonemes (is that the word?) that are still present in the mental representation of the language, but are not always pronounced depending on context. I don't know where the proper name Peugeot came from, but -eu- is the standard French graphy for a sound unknown in English (except as the first part of a diphtong in some recent forms of upper-class British English long O) but represented in German as ö; the e after the g is a diacritic, meaning g is pronounced soft before a,o,u; and -ot is a common diminutive ending where the -t (from, I guess, Latin -otus, -otum, as in factotum maybe?) used to be pronounced but isn't anymre. (About -ge- : The spelling of British gaol is much more surprising than its French counterpart geôle when considering how they are pronounced respectively.) Best regards, Tony.
Re: Other European languages on a US keyboard [OT]
[more way off topic comments] ...some linguists say that those silent letters are not artifacts, but reflect __phonemes__ (is that the word?) that are still present in the mental representation of the language... --__morphemes__, actually, from a written point of view (you did say letters). They are what's left of the word eroded from Latin and, like night in English, demonstrate (just as you have pointed out) the word's philology (etymology is somewhat correct, but focuses more on semantics than the morphemic transformation). Note: I studied Latin, Greek and Linguistics at Université de Paris X in the late 70s. Many French nouns, for example, evolve from the accusative (direct object) singular form in Latin with further erosion, rosam rose, templum temple, calculus calcule. This also accounts partially for what others see as French's tendency to accentuate the final syllable of a word; actually, there isn't really a tonic accent in French (I won't go into this), but the final of the word was often the penultimate in Latin, often the part receiving the tonic accent in that language (just as now in Italian, Spanish, etc.) and therefore could not be lost without compromising the word itself. Phonemes are (very) roughly equivalent to syllables and exist at the oral or phonetic level. French has the peculiarity, more than most other Western languages in my observation, of its end of word phonemes being greatly ambiguous due to the erosion from Latin already mentioned. Hence, it's easier to find rhymes both rich and otherwise in French even across gender boundaries (whereas Italian and Spanish have kept the o/a alternance when French erodes both feminine am and masculine um to silent e). The resulting explosion in jeux de mots (puns), so looked down upon or at least smirked at in English, is inexplicably prized in French (where it is so much more common in the first place): Le _saint_ père, _sain_ de corps et d'esprit, _ceint_ de vertu, couvait le mal dans son _sein_. (The _holy_ father, while _healthy_ in body and spirit, and _girded_ with virtue, nourished evil in his _breast_. All these underlined words are pronounced identically. There's yet another word or two in French pronounced the same way, but it's been too many years and I can't seem to conjure them up at the moment. If Linguistics paid a decent wage, I probably wouldn't be writing C code for a living. Is this off-topic or what? Russ A.J.Mechelynck wrote: Yakov Lerner wrote: On 7/24/06, A.J.Mechelynck [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: The French have used accented letters since (IIUC) before Gutenberg invented printing. While Antonie helps us with bits of history, I thought I'd ask this. I was on irc chat, and somehow the issue of French using a lot of silent letters came up. For example, Peugeot is 7 letters but 4 sounds. I don't speak French, but the tendency is there. Somebody explained that in middle ages, literacy was rare, and scribes were paid by letters written; and scribes would artificially inflate number of letter. Does this explanation hold water ? I know that generally in other languages, the silent letters are artifact of past real sounds that are preserved due to conservatism of orthography. Was if different in French ? Yakov In the Middle Ages, scribes weren't paid commercially (I think): they were monks and had their share in their convent's table and bed. Payment was to the convent, maybe by the thickness of the book, maybe according to the beauty of illustrations (and decorated letters), maybe according to how long it took to read the story aloud, I don't rightly know. Or else maybe some copists were attached to some nobleman's court, and wrote, copied or decorated books in return for being lodged, fed, clad, and generally cared for. I guess many small letters wouldn't have fetched very much more than slightly fewer, but slightly bigger, letters. French orthography has been largely fixed at some point of the Middle Ages (12th century?), but French pronunciation, like English pronunciation, has continued to evolve since then. Just like English spelling does not reflect the Great Vowel Shift, French spelling still uses letters that belong in the etymology, ceased to be pronounced at some point in the past, but reappear in the feminine or in liaison: un grand monsieur -- no liaison, the d in grand is silent un grand homme -- liaison, the d is sounded [t] une grande femme -- feminine, before unvoiced consonant, -de is sounded [t] une grande maison -- feminine, before voiced consonant, -de is sounded [d] elle est grande -- feminine, before pause, [d] une grand-mère -- compound, frozen before the adjective (from Lat. grandis in both genders) acquired -e in the feminine: no liaison, -d is silent. la grandeur -- derived word, with [d] pronounced. There are many such cases, also e.g. with verbs, or with plurals where the -s (from the Latin accusative
Re: Other European languages on a US keyboard [OT]
On Tue, Jul 25, 2006 at 10:27:58AM EDT, Russell Bateman wrote: [more way off topic comments] [...] Phonemes are (very) roughly equivalent to syllables and exist at the oral or phonetic level. French has the peculiarity, more than most other Western languages in my observation, of its end of word phonemes being greatly ambiguous due to the erosion from Latin already mentioned. Hence, it's easier to find rhymes both rich and otherwise in French even across gender boundaries (whereas Italian and Spanish have kept the o/a alternance when French erodes both feminine am and masculine um to silent e). The resulting explosion in jeux de mots (puns), so looked down upon or at least smirked at in English, is inexplicably prized in French (where it is so much more common in the first place): Le _saint_ père, _sain_ de corps et d'esprit, _ceint_ de vertu, couvait le mal dans son _sein_. (The _holy_ father, while _healthy_ in body and spirit, and _girded_ with virtue, nourished evil in his _breast_. All these underlined words are pronounced identically. There's yet another word or two in French pronounced the same way, but it's been too many years and I can't seem to conjure them up at the moment. seing .. as in blanc-seing If Linguistics paid a decent wage, I probably wouldn't be writing C code for a living. Is this off-topic or what? Russ
Re: Other European languages on a US keyboard
On Tue, Jul 25, 2006 at 03:09:29AM EDT, A.J.Mechelynck wrote: [..] and it can change fonts on-the-fly (change the font from Courier to Lucida to whatever, only through Vim keyboard commands). I would never want do that.. but just out of curiosity.. why would that not be possible in an xterm? because console Vim has no control over the xterm's fonts. ok. a bit more flexible than toggling the xterm's font. It can do real boldface and italics, as well as straight or curly underlining. That would be for highlighting stuff, right? So the same functionality can be achieved with colors. And in a more pleasing manner IMHO.. the color schemes that I have seen that use italics have not convinced me. I do html a lot, and it helps me to see iitalics, bbold italics, ubold underlined italics,/u/b uunderlined italics,/u/iuunderlined/u text all displayed like they should. .. meaning you can toggle between the source version and the rendered version of the document in Vim? Of course colours can do it, but console vim has only 16 bg and 16 fg colours: the list is soon over. .. my mistake.. I never counted them and I thought that console Vim on a 256-color xterm was capable of displaying 256 colors simultaneoulsy. [..] Note: :setl fenc=latin9 follows by :setl fenc? returns iso-8859-15. This is normal, they are two names for the same thing. So this should help clarify the issue. For more details, see :help mbyte.txt http://vim.sourceforge.net/tips/tip.php?tip_id=246 section 37 (last) of the Vim FAQ http://vimdoc.sourceforge.net/htmldoc/vimfaq.html http://www.unicode.org/ http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mgk25/unicode.html Thanks cga
Re: Other European languages on a US keyboard [OT]
Russell Bateman wrote: [more way off topic comments] ...some linguists say that those silent letters are not artifacts, but reflect __phonemes__ (is that the word?) that are still present in the mental representation of the language... --__morphemes__, actually, from a written point of view (you did say letters). They are what's left of the word eroded from Latin and, like night in English, demonstrate (just as you have pointed out) the word's philology (etymology is somewhat correct, but focuses more on semantics than the morphemic transformation). Note: I studied Latin, Greek and Linguistics at Université de Paris X in the late 70s. I haven't studied linguistics, other than as an amateur, so I have to defer to you. By etymology I meant here (as you understood) what might be called the word's linguistic history: night is the English form of the Germanic word which gave Dutch and German nacht where the -ch- is still pronounced as a guttural consonant. Similarly light (NL/DE licht), though (DE doch), through (DE durch), etc. Many French nouns, for example, evolve from the accusative (direct object) singular form in Latin with further erosion, rosam rose, templum temple, calculus calcule. This also accounts partially for what others see as French's tendency to accentuate the final syllable of a word; actually, there isn't really a tonic accent in French (I won't go into this), but the final of the word was often the penultimate in Latin, often the part receiving the tonic accent in that language (just as now in Italian, Spanish, etc.) and therefore could not be lost without compromising the word itself. Phonemes are (very) roughly equivalent to syllables and exist at the oral or phonetic level. French has the peculiarity, more than most other Western languages in my observation, of its end of word phonemes being greatly ambiguous due to the erosion from Latin already mentioned. Hence, it's easier to find rhymes both rich and otherwise in French even across gender boundaries (whereas Italian and Spanish have kept the o/a alternance when French erodes both feminine am and masculine um to silent e). The resulting explosion in jeux de mots (puns), so looked down upon or at least smirked at in English, is inexplicably prized in French (where it is so much more common in the first place): Le _saint_ père, _sain_ de corps et d'esprit, _ceint_ de vertu, couvait le mal dans son _sein_. (The _holy_ father, while _healthy_ in body and spirit, and _girded_ with virtue, nourished evil in his _breast_. All these underlined words are pronounced identically. There's yet another word or two in French pronounced the same way, but it's been too many years and I can't seem to conjure them up at the moment. Gentlemen, that reminds me: Un _sot_ à la potrine étriquée chevauchait un âne. Il tenait dans sa main droite le _sceau_ destiné à marquer le _seau_ qu'il tenait de sa main gauche. Subitement, l'âne fait un écart et [letrwasotõb]. Comment écrivez-vous [letrwaso]? Réponse: l'étroit sot. -- Again, not really translatable. A narrow-chested _fool_ [so] was riding an ass. He was holding in his right hand the _seal_ [so] with which to mark the _bucket_ [so] he was holding in his left. Suddenly, the ass shies and (the three [so] fall). How do you write (the three [so])? Answer: the narrow fool (because the three and the narrow are also homonymous, and so are the 3rd persons sg. pl. of to fall in the indicative present). If Linguistics paid a decent wage, I probably wouldn't be writing C code for a living. :D Is this off-topic or what? Russ Yes, it is, but it's fun, isn't it? Best regards, Tony.
Re: Other European languages on a US keyboard
cga2000 wrote: On Tue, Jul 25, 2006 at 03:09:29AM EDT, A.J.Mechelynck wrote: [..] and it can change fonts on-the-fly (change the font from Courier to Lucida to whatever, only through Vim keyboard commands). I would never want do that.. but just out of curiosity.. why would that not be possible in an xterm? because console Vim has no control over the xterm's fonts. ok. a bit more flexible than toggling the xterm's font. It can do real boldface and italics, as well as straight or curly underlining. That would be for highlighting stuff, right? So the same functionality can be achieved with colors. And in a more pleasing manner IMHO.. the color schemes that I have seen that use italics have not convinced me. I do html a lot, and it helps me to see iitalics, bbold italics, ubold underlined italics,/u/b uunderlined italics,/u/iuunderlined/u text all displayed like they should. .. meaning you can toggle between the source version and the rendered version of the document in Vim? [...] No, I still see the tags, and font color=redblah blah blah/font doesn't make blah blah blah show up red in gvim, but the HTML syntax has groups htmlItalic, htmlBold, htmlUnderlined, htmlBoldItalic, etc., which appear as italic, bold, underlined, bold-italic, etc., in the GUI (unless, of course, a colorscheme changes them, but why would it want to?). Similarly, the built-in spell checker uses (by default) curly underlining, so the background and foreground colours of the underlying text are not altered. Best regards, Tony.
Re: Other European languages on a US keyboard
On Mon, Jul 24, 2006 at 03:36:54AM EDT, Matthew Winn wrote: On Sun, Jul 23, 2006 at 06:41:09PM -0400, cga2000 wrote: Avoid words such as coeur.. boeuf.. etc. Rather amazing that the French who are so picky about anything that concerns their language never came up with a codepage.. or whatever it's called that features this particular character. I think it dates from the days when typewriters were popular. The US dominance of the market for office equipment prompted many European languages to manage without combinations like oe, ae and ij where the characters can be approximated by typing separate letters. It's easier to change typing habits than to manufacture a new range of typewriters just to deal with one special letter. .. hmm.. as far as I know only France and Germany went to the trouble of designing their own typewriter keyboard layouts separate from the QWERTY model. I think Polish keyboards are derived from the German layout.. I would assume variations of the French layout are used in other French-speaking countries and some African countries.. As to other European countries - ie. the ones that speak neither French nor German - I believe that you are correct and that they use derivatives of the US keyboard. Therefore, since the French went so far as building keyboards that have the basic letters arranged differently (AZERTY instead of QWERTY) it would not have been such a major enhancement to provide an oe some place on that keyboard..? I have a feeling it is more a question of whoever designed the original French typewriter keyboard just did not think it worth bothering with such typographic niceties as providing an o dans l'e (or is it the other way round?) when the end result with fixed-width characters was going to be light-years removed from the refinements of traditional typesetting anyway.. But I would agree that the absence of the oe on French keyboards (typewriters and computers alike) probably accounts for the fact that you can't find it anywhere in the latin* charsets. Prior to computers many keyboards didn't even have separate keys for the digits 1 and 0, typists using the letters l and O instead. I was aware of the l/1 thing.. sometimes use it when I feel lazy. Thanks cga
Re: Other European languages on a US keyboard
As you say, warning: off-topic post. Read at your own risk. This discussion underlines all the more strongly why I don't attempt to produce final documents using vim: I sometimes use an actual word processor like Open Office Writer, but mostly I write in HTML and, of course, the best HTML editor on the planet is... ...vim! Russ P.S. Yes, typing eacute; , oelig; and uuml; is painful, but I'm one of those perfectionists who would have used half-spacing back in the old days if I had been in need of such things. My father used a non-electric typewriter, but I was 19 before I moved to France from the US and needed what wasn't on the keyboard. After coming back at 25 (some 26+ years ago now), I never lost the need to communicate and product documents of with accents, digraphs, etc. in fact, I added the need to compose classical Greek texts while in France, but that's a whole other mess. A.J.Mechelynck wrote: Warning: off-topic post. Read at your own risk. Before computers, I used a French typewriter keyboard (AZERTY type). Nowadays I use a Belgian computer keyboard (also AZERTY but with special characters arranged differently). My father has an old typewriter he bought in Switzerland when he was a student, and it uses a QWERTZ layout. (Switzerland has four official languages, viz. German, French, Italian and Romanche; and I don't know how many different keyboards they use.) On a mechanical typewriter, it was possible to use half-spacing by holding the space bar down. So, if one wanted to produce the oe digraph on a French typewriter (not an electric one though), it was possible -- for a perfectionist. Let's say I wanted to type boeuf (= beef/ox): 1. press and hold spacebar. This advances the carriage by one half space 2. hit b. This prints b without moving the carriage. 3. release, press and hold spacebar. 4. hit o 5. release spacebar. The carriage is now over the right half of the o. 6. hit e u f in succession. The oe digraph is called o, e dans l'o and the ae digraph is called in French a, e dans l'a. The latter as in Serge Gainsbourg's song elaeudanla téitéia (which spells the name Laetitia). French typewriters indeed seldom had the digits one and zero: small-ell and big-oh were used insted. But it even carried over to computers: Several decades ago (before the merger with Honeywell), the (French) Bull computer company used on its computers a charset where the same character could mean either zero or O-for-Oscar depending on context -- and another one, I think, could mean one or I-for-India. (Few computers had lowercase in those days.) This, of course, caused headaches without end when trying to convert those computers' magnetic tapes to IBM's BCD and EBCDIC standards or to (whose? PDP? CDC? other?) ASCII. I'm not sure non-English non-French non-German speaking countries all use a US-derived keyboard, even if we limit ourselves to those that use variants of the Latin alphabet. Typewriters, after all, date back to (I think) before World War I, a time when English was much less dominant internationally than it is now. At the courts of St-Petersburg and Potsdam, French was spoken; Germany and Austria together covered (or had recently covered) a territory that went from Alsace to Silesia and from Schleswig-Holstein to the plain of the Po. I suspect that most of Central Europe would have adopted a German-derived (or maybe French-derived) keyboard regardless of whether the majority language was Czech, Slovak, Italian, Hungarian, Croatian... I agree that the lack of oe OE digraphs in the Latin charsets is probably due to their absence on French typewriter keyboards. (AE ae were kept because they are used in Danish.) There is more than a single-letter difference with English though: not only the layout is different but there are several accented letters. The French (and Belgian) keyboards have a dead key for circumflex and trema/diaeresis/umlaut, but à ç é è ù and sometimes uppercase-C-cedilla each have their own glyphs. (In French, uppercase letters with the exception of C-cedilla and sometimes E-acute were usually left unaccented. I believe computers are slowly pushing back the trend.) Best regards, Tony.
Re: Other European languages on a US keyboard
Russell Bateman wrote: As you say, warning: off-topic post. Read at your own risk. This discussion underlines all the more strongly why I don't attempt to produce final documents using vim: I sometimes use an actual word processor like Open Office Writer, but mostly I write in HTML and, of course, the best HTML editor on the planet is... ...vim! ;-) Russ P.S. Yes, typing eacute; , oelig; and uuml; is painful, but I'm one of those perfectionists who would have used half-spacing back in the old days if I had been in need of such things. My father used a non-electric typewriter, but I was 19 before I moved to France from the US and needed what wasn't on the keyboard. After coming back at 25 (some 26+ years ago now), I never lost the need to communicate and product documents of with accents, digraphs, etc. in fact, I added the need to compose classical Greek texts while in France, but that's a whole other mess. ... and I bought an IBM ball typewriter so I could type not only Latin but also Greek and Russian. I even lent it to the World Esperanto Congress of 1982 in Antwerp, so journalists could write home in their respective languages. Don't know if they used it (the keyboard layout must have felt weird to them). Somewhere at vim-online I have a script htmlmap.vim which auto-converts ç to ccedil; É to Eacute; etc. as you type; and F12 o e to #339; etc. (not all browsers understand oelig; -- or did when I started: Netscape 4, e.g., didn't). (Useful when the browser doesn't know if it's reading UTF-8 or some flavour of Latin.) Source it from %HOME%\vimfiles\after\ftplugin\html.vim or ~/.vim/after/plugin/html.vim. I'm not sure if it works when 'encoding' is set to UTF-8 though. Best regards, Tony.
RE: Other European languages on a US keyboard
Rare enough .. but besides oeuf is also occurs in such very common words as voeu [wish] and coeur [heart] and it really bothers me when I see them incorrectly spelled in web pages for instance. I spot it and after that I tend to lose focus and not be able to take in what I'm reading for a short while. How're they misspelled? Or, if none of the distributed keymaps is exactly what you want, you can write your own. It isn't hard. See :help :loadkeymap for the theory, and look at the contents of Bram's $VIMRUNTIME/keymap/accents.vim and my $VIMRUNTIME/keymap/esperanto_utf8.vim for a couple of simple examples. Already started on this: copied accents.vim to ~/.vim/keymap/ .. renamed it to foreign.vim and added the Spanish inverted question / exclamation marks - an for now I have mapped to !! and ??. Come to think of it, French would appear to have the most annoying spelling system of the West European languages that I have some degree of familiarity with. Spanish, Italian, and German seem to use fewer non-ASCII characters. In order to set up my foreign language keymap correctly I would really need tables of all the characters that occur in these languages, decide which ones are common enough to be worth adding to the keymap, and make sure I build a scheme that's coherent before I get my fingers to memorize it. I'll scour the Wiki's later today.. see if I can find anything useful. If you wouldn't mind, definitely keep me in the loop on this one, as I've got something of an interest. Offhand, some contributions and questions: beta-looking SS (German) slashed 'l' (Polish) slashed 'o' (Scandinavian or thereabouts, not sure if Dutch or other) AElig/aelig/OElig/oelig (Latin, etc.) ccedil/Ccedil (how done, ,C?) ecedil(?) (also Polish, possibly other vowels, 'though don't recall offhand) Oh, someone on the list is native Polish, so might ask him. Was it Mikolaj? Dunno anyone Dutch who'd recall the slashed-'o'. How to enter Aring (eg, Aring;ngstrom)? oA?? Synonymous with aa (eg, Haas == Haring;s?) Oh, well...
Re: Other European languages on a US keyboard
cga2000 wrote: I sometimes need to write text in other languages such as French, Spanish and occasionally German or Italian. ..snip.. I would like to do this in Vim. Unfortunately I only have a US keyboard. Have you considered EasyAccents.vim? http://vim.sourceforge.net/scripts/script.php?script_id=451 It doesn't use the spelling checker in vim 7.0, but it accepts a' a` a^ a: etc to generate accented characters. Easy to turn on and off, too: \eza toggles. Regards, Chip Campbell
Re: Other European languages on a US keyboard
Schleswig-Holstein to the plain of the Po. I suspect that most of Central Europe would have adopted a German-derived (or maybe French-derived) keyboard regardless of whether the majority language was Czech, Slovak, Italian, Hungarian, Croatian... In fact Polish traditional keyboard is modelled after German layout (with addition of Polish diacritics on separate keys). Only very fast spreading of computers in the beginning of '90 connected with lack of production of those keyboards lead to wide adoption of Polish programmer keyboard (US 101 with diacritics by AltGr not separate keys). m.
Re: Other European languages on a US keyboard
On Mon, Jul 24, 2006 at 10:50:33AM EDT, Gene Kwiecinski wrote: Rare enough .. but besides oeuf is also occurs in such very common words as voeu [wish] and coeur [heart] and it really bothers me when I see them incorrectly spelled in web pages for instance. I spot it and after that I tend to lose focus and not be able to take in what I'm reading for a short while. How're they misspelled? well .. can't give you a sample of the correct spelling - ie. the single oe character instead of the o .. a space and the e.. - since I am not running with an UTF8 locale.. and even that might not work if you are running latin1 for instance. so to get my meaning you need to go to www.wordreference.com .. enter egg in the Enter Word field and check the English to French radio button.. Enter .. and a few lines down you should see a bunch of oeuf correctly spelled .. bad egg - oeuf pourri, for example.. provided your browser is set up to display UTF8, naturally.. otherwise.. I'll have to put up a screenshot some place.. [...] In order to set up my foreign language keymap correctly I would really need tables of all the characters that occur in these languages, decide which ones are common enough to be worth adding to the keymap, and make sure I build a scheme that's coherent before I get my fingers to memorize it. I'll scour the Wiki's later today.. see if I can find anything useful. If you wouldn't mind, definitely keep me in the loop on this one, as I've got something of an interest. Not much joy where finding tables of all characters used in typesetting for different languages, I'm afraid. I did find this regarding keyboard layouts though: http://www-306.ibm.com/software/globalization/topics/keyboards/registry_index.jsp .. as usual I had a very simplified vision of the problem. Offhand, some contributions and questions: beta-looking SS (German) .. used to know this as an s-tset (phonetic rendering..) slashed 'l' (Polish) no knowledge of slavonic languages here.. sorry. looks like Poland has somewhat switched to a US-derived keyboard where computers are concerned. And Tony was right assuming that most central European countries - Czech.. Slovak.. Slovenian/Croatian.. Moldovan.. Hungarian.. even Rumanian have keyboards that are derived from the German layout. slashed 'o' (Scandinavian or thereabouts, not sure if Dutch or other) don't think Dutch has this. AElig/aelig/OElig/oelig (Latin, etc.) Danes Norwegians have a key for AElig right on the keyboard. ccedil/Ccedil (how done, ,C?) Some keyboards - French.. Italian.. Portuguese.. have a ccedil key ecedil(?) (also Polish, possibly other vowels, 'though don't recall offhand) Doesn't appear to be one on the Polish keyboard as pictured at the IBM site. Oh, someone on the list is native Polish, so might ask him. Was it Mikolaj? Dunno anyone Dutch who'd recall the slashed-'o'. Can't think a town in Holland that has this .. so I would assume it's not indigenous (?) How to enter Aring (eg, Aring;ngstrom)? oA?? Synonymous with aa (eg, Haas == Haring;s?) Oh, well... Yes, I could say I agree with that last remark.. Vast subject.. but quite fascinating.. :-) Real glad I started this thread.. Learned some useful stuff here.. Thanks cga
Re: Other European languages on a US keyboard
Warning: this email is in UTF-8. U+ below (where is in hex) is the Unicode notation for a character (Unicode codepoint) given by value. Gene Kwiecinski wrote: Rare enough .. but besides oeuf is also occurs in such very common words as voeu [wish] and coeur [heart] and it really bothers me when I see them incorrectly spelled in web pages for instance. I spot it and after that I tend to lose focus and not be able to take in what I'm reading for a short while. How're they misspelled? the above should all have œ (oe digraph, as one character) not o followed by e (two characters) Or, if none of the distributed keymaps is exactly what you want, you can write your own. It isn't hard. See :help :loadkeymap for the theory, and look at the contents of Bram's $VIMRUNTIME/keymap/accents.vim and my $VIMRUNTIME/keymap/esperanto_utf8.vim for a couple of simple examples. Already started on this: copied accents.vim to ~/.vim/keymap/ .. renamed it to foreign.vim and added the Spanish inverted question / exclamation marks - an for now I have mapped to !! and ??. Come to think of it, French would appear to have the most annoying spelling system of the West European languages that I have some degree of familiarity with. Spanish, Italian, and German seem to use fewer non-ASCII characters. Spanish and Italian both can accent any vowel (grave accent in Italian, acute accent in Italian), and Spanish also has inverted ? and ! Catalan has some grave-accented vowels, some acute-accented ones, some which can take either, the c-cedilla, and also a lettergroup which I've seen in no other language: ll with a dot at mid-height between them, to mean geminated l (pron. as French ll) as opposed to palatalized l (pron. more or less as Spanish ll). ŀl, U+0140 U+006C, decimal 320 108; K l . followed by plain l. Examples: geminated in coŀlinear, palatalized in coll (mountain pass). The Spanish inverted ? and ! are optional in Catalan but can be used in the middle of a sentence to mark the start of the question or exclamation. The uppercase equivalent (ĿL, used only in full-capitals titles since the geminated ells must be part of different syllables, has Ŀ = U+013F, dec. 319, Ctrl-K L . In order to set up my foreign language keymap correctly I would really need tables of all the characters that occur in these languages, decide which ones are common enough to be worth adding to the keymap, and make sure I build a scheme that's coherent before I get my fingers to memorize it. I'll scour the Wiki's later today.. see if I can find anything useful. If you wouldn't mind, definitely keep me in the loop on this one, as I've got something of an interest. Offhand, some contributions and questions: beta-looking SS (German) ß eszet, U+00DF, decimal 223. Don't know if the accents keymap has it. With digraphs: Ctrl-K s s slashed 'l' (Polish) ł -- don't know the name; I'd guess hard l (pronounced more or less as w in Polish but etymologically related to what the Russian pronounce like the ll in English bell). Don't think accents has it as it is 255. U+0142, decimal 322, Ctrl-K l / -- Uppercase: Ł U+0141, dec. 321, Ctrl-K L / slashed 'o' (Scandinavian or thereabouts, not sure if Dutch or other) Danish and Norwegian, not Swedish, equivalent of German/Swedish ö. ø, U+00F8, decimal 248, Ctrl-K o / -- Uppercase: Ø, U+00D8, decimal 216, Ctrl-K O / -- I guess /O and /o with the accents keymap. In other languages, a similar or identical glyph is used to mean diameter. AElig/aelig/OElig/oelig (Latin, etc.) Among modern languages: Danish Æ AE U+00C6 dec.198 Ctrl-K A E æ ae U+00E6 dec.230 Ctrl-K a e French Œ OE U+0152 dec.338 Ctrl-K O E œ oe U+0153 dec.339 Ctrl-K o e ccedil/Ccedil (how done, ,C?) in the accents keymap, Ithink so. With digraphs, Ctrl-K c , or Ctrl-K C , -- U+00C7, decimal 199 (Ç) and U+00E7, decimal 231 (ç). ecedil(?) (also Polish, possibly other vowels, 'though don't recall offhand) ę, it's not a cedilla, (it's turned the other way), it's called an ogonek (thus: e-ogonek). If your keymap hasn't got it, it's Ctrl-K e ; -- U+0119, decimal 281. Oh, someone on the list is native Polish, so might ask him. Was it Mikolaj? Dunno anyone Dutch who'd recall the slashed-'o'. Its not Dutch, its Danish and Norwegian. Dutch only has ij IJ (usually typed as two letters, it's up to the browser to fetch the presentation form if deemed appropriate, like with French fi ffi fl ffl etc. IJ is used e.g. in IJsland (Iceland), IJszee (the Glacial Ocean, usually the Artic, but there is also a Zuidelijke IJszee around the Antartic continent), IJ (a river in the Netherlands, with the town of IJmuiden at its mouth IIRC), IJssel (two other rivers: Hollandse IJssel and Gelderse IJssel; the latter ends up in the IJsselmeer); ijs (ice) becomes IJs at the start of a sentence, etc. Dutch also has some accented vowels in
Re: Other European languages on a US keyboard
On Mon, Jul 24, 2006 at 09:02:34AM EDT, Russell Bateman wrote: As you say, warning: off-topic post. Read at your own risk. .. don't see this as OT.. Being lazy I skipped the .. in Vim in the subject.. This discussion underlines all the more strongly why I don't attempt to produce final documents using vim: I sometimes use an actual word processor like Open Office Writer, but mostly I write in HTML and, of course, the best HTML editor on the planet is... Maybe I should dump LaTeX and use HTML.. I printed some of the TeX-gen'd stuff and it just looks too beautiful.. I end up with correspondence that looks more like pages torn out of an expensive book.. ...vim! agreed.. natch'.. Russ P.S. Yes, typing eacute; , oelig; and uuml; is painful, but I'm one of those perfectionists who would have used half-spacing back in the old days if I had been in need of such things. My father used a non-electric typewriter, but I was 19 before I moved to France from the US and needed what wasn't on the keyboard. After coming back at 25 (some 26+ years ago now), I never lost the need to communicate and product documents of with accents, digraphs, etc. yes.. have a feeling only the folks at the Académie Française and enlightened foreigners are really concerned about this these days.. I'm sure the French don't take notice or give a damn whether you write laetitia or lætitia.. Hope you get my accents.. cedillas.. and e dans l'a above.. in fact, I added the need to compose classical Greek texts while in France, but that's a whole other mess. [..] Thanks cga
Re: Other European languages on a US keyboard
On Mon, Jul 24, 2006 at 08:37:47AM EDT, A.J.Mechelynck wrote: Warning: off-topic post. Read at your own risk. [..] Before computers, I used a French typewriter keyboard (AZERTY type). Nowadays I use a Belgian computer keyboard (also AZERTY but with special characters arranged differently). My father has an old typewriter he bought in Switzerland when he was a student, and it uses a QWERTZ layout. (Switzerland has four official languages, viz. German, French, Italian and Romanche; and I don't know how many different keyboards they use.) On a mechanical typewriter, it was possible to use half-spacing by holding the space bar down. So, if one wanted to produce the oe digraph on a French typewriter (not an electric one though), it was possible -- for a perfectionist. Let's say I wanted to type boeuf (= beef/ox): 1. press and hold spacebar. This advances the carriage by one half space 2. hit b. This prints b without moving the carriage. 3. release, press and hold spacebar. 4. hit o 5. release spacebar. The carriage is now over the right half of the o. 6. hit e u f in succession. .. makes my mouth water.. I should try Ebay .. see if I can find an affordable high-end typewriter that does such fancy stuff. The oe digraph is called o, e dans l'o and the ae digraph is called in French a, e dans l'a. The latter as in Serge Gainsbourg's song elaeudanla téitéia (which spells the name Laetitia). phew.. this one took me a couple of minutes to figure out.. !! French typewriters indeed seldom had the digits one and zero: small-ell and big-oh were used insted. But it even carried over to computers: Several decades ago (before the merger with Honeywell), the (French) Bull computer company used on its computers a charset where the same character could mean either zero or O-for-Oscar depending on context -- and another one, I think, could mean one or I-for-India. (Few computers had lowercase in those days.) This, of course, caused headaches without end when trying to convert those computers' magnetic tapes to IBM's BCD and EBCDIC standards or to (whose? PDP? CDC? other?) ASCII. Hehe.. maybe a bit of OT at one point in the designers' career wouldn't have hurt.. Sounds like the year 2000 business.. but worse.. What did they do? Hired a few thousand data entry folks to do the conversion.. Not sure regex's had been invented at the time. .. anyway .. as I always say we should all go back to writing in Latin Roman numerals.. I'm not sure non-English non-French non-German speaking countries all use a US-derived keyboard, even if we limit ourselves to those that use variants of the Latin alphabet. Typewriters, after all, date back to (I think) before World War I, a time when English was much less dominant internationally than it is now. At the courts of St-Petersburg and Potsdam, French was spoken; Germany and Austria together covered (or had recently covered) a territory that went from Alsace to Silesia and from Schleswig-Holstein to the plain of the Po. I suspect that most of Central Europe would have adopted a German-derived (or maybe French-derived) keyboard regardless of whether the majority language was Czech, Slovak, Italian, Hungarian, Croatian... quick googling for keyboard layout shows that you are correct. I don't trust Wiki's 100% but this page has some useful keyboard layouts: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Keyboard_layout I agree that the lack of oe OE digraphs in the Latin charsets is probably due to their absence on French typewriter keyboards. (AE ae were kept because they are used in Danish.) There is more than a single-letter difference with English though: not only the layout is different but there are several accented letters. The French (and Belgian) .. somewhat to my surprise the Belgian keyboard uses the AZERTY layout while the Netherlands use QWERTY. But then this would make sense since as far as I recall Dutch/Flemish is pretty limited to the ASCII charset and that's obviously available on AZERTY keyboards. So they only needed to accomodate the French-speaking community. But doesn't Belgium also have a German-speaking community? Ah.. maybe it was just that most businesses were owned by French-speaking Belgians at the time the layout was adopted.. keyboards have a dead key for circumflex and trema/diaeresis/umlaut, but à ç é è ù and sometimes uppercase-C-cedilla each have their own glyphs. (In French, uppercase letters with the exception of C-cedilla and sometimes E-acute were usually left unaccented. I believe computers are slowly pushing back the trend.) Actually I found that there is such a thing as a US International Keyboard and maybe I could acquire one of those since it all the fancy characters that I would want.. Best regards, Tony. Thanks much for all this pre-computer days lore..! Doesn't hurt to know a little something about where we came from.. Thanks cga
Re: Other European languages on a US keyboard
Of course, we all realize that the original difference between AZERTY and QWERTY was the analyzed solutions to the problem of the likelihood of two typewriter hammers striking the platen in close enough succession that they would jam together and get stuck. Accents arose as a distinction only because the French decided, based presumably on a letter frequency analysis that AZERTY was the optimal key arrangement based on letter frequency in French words while Americans (I've never noticed what they type on in England) chose QWERTY. It was always a puzzle to me in my childhood as to why the keys weren't arranged in a more obvious fashion. It wasn't answered until, as I was acquainted with the Dvorak key layout, it was explained to me why typewriter keys had been arranged like that in the first place. Of course, now, it's all just tradition--strong enough that the Dvorak guys haven't carried the day and the chording guys are just a lone voice in the wilderness. cga2000 wrote: On Mon, Jul 24, 2006 at 08:37:47AM EDT, A.J.Mechelynck wrote: Warning: off-topic post. Read at your own risk. [..] Before computers, I used a French typewriter keyboard (AZERTY type). Nowadays I use a Belgian computer keyboard (also AZERTY but with special characters arranged differently). My father has an old typewriter he bought in Switzerland when he was a student, and it uses a QWERTZ layout. (Switzerland has four official languages, viz. German, French, Italian and Romanche; and I don't know how many different keyboards they use.) [snip]
RE: Other European languages on a US keyboard [OT]
This thread reminded me of an experiment I saw a couple of years ago that really interested me, given my background in AI. http://www.visi.com/~pmk/evolved.html To summarize, a guy is trying to evolve a good keyboard layout by deriving interesting metrics. A use for genetic algorithms at last! Regrettably, he didn't have much luck, with the Dvorak layout winning out against all his genetically created layouts, which implies that either his heuristics weren't strong enough, or he didn't let it evolve for long enough. When I have the time I intend to attempt his experiment myself to see if I can produce any useful results. Max -Original Message- From: Russell Bateman [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Monday, July 24, 2006 1:26 PM To: vim@vim.org Subject: Re: Other European languages on a US keyboard Of course, we all realize that the original difference between AZERTY and QWERTY was the analyzed solutions to the problem of the likelihood of two typewriter hammers striking the platen in close enough succession that they would jam together and get stuck. Accents arose as a distinction only because the French decided, based presumably on a letter frequency analysis that AZERTY was the optimal key arrangement based on letter frequency in French words while Americans (I've never noticed what they type on in England) chose QWERTY. It was always a puzzle to me in my childhood as to why the keys weren't arranged in a more obvious fashion. It wasn't answered until, as I was acquainted with the Dvorak key layout, it was explained to me why typewriter keys had been arranged like that in the first place. Of course, now, it's all just tradition--strong enough that the Dvorak guys haven't carried the day and the chording guys are just a lone voice in the wilderness. cga2000 wrote: On Mon, Jul 24, 2006 at 08:37:47AM EDT, A.J.Mechelynck wrote: Warning: off-topic post. Read at your own risk. [..] Before computers, I used a French typewriter keyboard (AZERTY type). Nowadays I use a Belgian computer keyboard (also AZERTY but with special characters arranged differently). My father has an old typewriter he bought in Switzerland when he was a student, and it uses a QWERTZ layout. (Switzerland has four official languages, viz. German, French, Italian and Romanche; and I don't know how many different keyboards they use.) [snip]
Re: Other European languages on a US keyboard
On Mon, Jul 24, 2006 at 12:05:02PM EDT, Charles E Campbell Jr wrote: cga2000 wrote: I sometimes need to write text in other languages such as French, Spanish and occasionally German or Italian. ..snip.. I would like to do this in Vim. Unfortunately I only have a US keyboard. Have you considered EasyAccents.vim? http://vim.sourceforge.net/scripts/script.php?script_id=451 That's exactly the sort of thing I initially had in mind but since I've already spent some time getting familiar with the standard (?) Vim solution (:set keymap=) and it's a breeze to customize I'll probably stick with that. What I like abut the :set keymap solution is that if you wait a fraction of a second between ' and e for instance Vim realizes that you want an apostrophe followed by an e.. not an e with acute accent and moves the cusor to the next position.. Another way to achieve this is to map two apostrophes to the (single) apostrophe in your keymap description.. so you type two ''s in quick succession when you want an apostrophe rather than an accented letter.. But I find the former method more natural. Thanks all the same. Appreciate your help. It doesn't use the spelling checker in vim 7.0, but it accepts a' a` a^ a: etc to generate accented characters. Easy to turn on and off, too: \eza toggles. For some bizarre reason .. something in my Vim setup .. I've never managed to get this '\' leader escape character to work. So for the vimspell plugin for instance I have to type the :* commands. Regards, Chip Campbell
Re: Other European languages on a US keyboard
cga2000 wrote: On Mon, Jul 24, 2006 at 08:37:47AM EDT, A.J.Mechelynck wrote: Warning: off-topic post. Read at your own risk. [...] On a mechanical typewriter, it was possible to use half-spacing by holding the space bar down. So, if one wanted to produce the oe digraph on a French typewriter (not an electric one though), it was possible -- for a perfectionist. Let's say I wanted to type boeuf (= beef/ox): 1. press and hold spacebar. This advances the carriage by one half space 2. hit b. This prints b without moving the carriage. 3. release, press and hold spacebar. 4. hit o 5. release spacebar. The carriage is now over the right half of the o. 6. hit e u f in succession. .. makes my mouth water.. I should try Ebay .. see if I can find an affordable high-end typewriter that does such fancy stuff. You might have to buy an antique: only mechanical (not electrical) typewriters behaved this way. [...] .. somewhat to my surprise the Belgian keyboard uses the AZERTY layout while the Netherlands use QWERTY. But then this would make sense since as far as I recall Dutch/Flemish is pretty limited to the ASCII charset and that's obviously available on AZERTY keyboards. So they only needed to accomodate the French-speaking community. But doesn't Belgium also have a German-speaking community? Ah.. maybe it was just that most businesses were owned by French-speaking Belgians at the time the layout was adopted.. German, or German together with French, is spoken in parts of three cantons (i.e., in part of the territory of three Justices of the Peace), near the German border. The Brussels area is bilingual French/Dutch; a number of municipalities near the French/Dutch language border have, at least in theory, a protected minority of the opposite linguistic persuasion. Said border runs approximately East-West from somewhere between Dunkirk and Lille to the vicinity of Maastricht where it hits the German language area. In the 19th century, the Belgian high classes (nobility, liberal professions, rich merchants, etc.) spoke French as their mother language all over the country. In 1830 (15 years after the merger) the Catholic Belgians revolted against the Calvinist Dutch, then (after rejecting several other candidates) accepted as king Leopold of Saxony-Coburg, a Protestant who was the uncle of Queen Victoria, and married to a daughter of Louis-Philippe Premier, roi des Français (or did he marry her for the occasion?). Louis-Philippe's dynasty was ended for good after only 18 years but Leopold's has endured (with some ups and downs) to this day. The Flemish nationalistic movement was not necessarily created, but at least sponsored by the Germans during both world wars as a possible use of the Divide et impera maxim. The Dutch language has gained equality with French over the Kingdom in general and a quasi-monopole north of the language border, but there is still a strong feeling of resentment against the French-speaking oppressor among part of the Flemish. The far-right racist and nationalistic Vlaams Belang (formerly Vlaams Blok) party has, IIRC, some 20% of the votes in the harbour city of Antwerp... especially in rich boroughs where hardly any Muslim, Jew or French-speaker have ever been sighted... But I digress. keyboards have a dead key for circumflex and trema/diaeresis/umlaut, but à ç é è ù and sometimes uppercase-C-cedilla each have their own glyphs. (In French, uppercase letters with the exception of C-cedilla and sometimes E-acute were usually left unaccented. I believe computers are slowly pushing back the trend.) Actually I found that there is such a thing as a US International Keyboard and maybe I could acquire one of those since it all the fancy characters that I would want.. Oh, golly! Good to know. Hope you won't get stuck with a keyboard that your OS doesn't recognise. Best regards, Tony. Thanks much for all this pre-computer days lore..! Doesn't hurt to know a little something about where we came from.. Thanks cga My pleasure. Best regards, Tony.
Re: Other European languages on a US keyboard
Russell Bateman wrote: Of course, we all realize that the original difference between AZERTY and QWERTY was the analyzed solutions to the problem of the likelihood of two typewriter hammers striking the platen in close enough succession that they would jam together and get stuck. Accents arose as a distinction only because the French decided, based presumably on a letter frequency analysis that AZERTY was the optimal key arrangement based on letter frequency in French words while Americans (I've never noticed what they type on in England) chose QWERTY. It was always a puzzle to me in my childhood as to why the keys weren't arranged in a more obvious fashion. It wasn't answered until, as I was acquainted with the Dvorak key layout, it was explained to me why typewriter keys had been arranged like that in the first place. Of course, now, it's all just tradition--strong enough that the Dvorak guys haven't carried the day and the chording guys are just a lone voice in the wilderness. I don't follow what you're saying about accents (typo?). The French have used accented letters since (IIUC) before Gutenberg invented printing. Yes, the various typewriter keyboards are supposed to be the result of some ergology research, but I don't know the details. IIRC the QWERTY keyboard was invented in England at a time when that was the leading industrial country in the world. W is quite rare in French while -ez is part of the universal second-person-plural ending of verbs; but wouldn't the latter make one think that placing z next to e (well, next on the keyboard, and separated by only S 3 X in the machinery) would cause _more_ jamming in mechanical typewriters? The q is safely away from the u... Best regards, Tony.
Re: Other European languages on a US keyboard
* A.J.Mechelynck on Saturday, July 22, 2006 at 22:40:45 +0200:
The French oe (o, e-dans-l'o) is not defined in the Latin1 encoding,
neither in capitals (as for titles or if the word oeuf [egg] is the
first of a sentence), nor in lowercase. You need UTF-8 for it,
No. Just latin9 or ISO8859-15 (Look at the header of this mail).
Mon cœur.
This is on a Mac with a German keyboard, but using actually an
American keyboard layout. I enter the œ with Alt-q (the Alt
key on Mac keyboard corresponds to the Modifier key on other
keyboards I believe).
$ echo $LANG
en_US.ISO8859-15
Alain Bench @ mutt-users pointed me to this site:
http://www.in-ulm.de/~mascheck/locale/
where you can get also a little utility at
http://www.in-ulm.de/~mascheck/locale/checklocale.c
It gives the following output here:
[Latin1/9] If there's no real copyrightsymbol at the end of this sentence,
then your terminal/terminalemulator/font is not ISO8859-1/15 ready: ©
- Current environment settings:
LANG= en_US.ISO8859-15
- Implicitly setting all locale categories with LANG succeeded.
Testing LC_CTYPE with isprint():
# # # # # # # # # # # # # # # #
# # # # # # # # # # # # # # # #
! # $ % ' ( ) * + , - . /
0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 : ; = ?
@ A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O
P Q R S T U V W X Y Z [ \ ] ^ _
` a b c d e f g h i j k l m n o
p q r s t u v w x y z { | } ~ #
# # # # # # # # # # # # # # # #
# # # # # # # # # # # # # # # #
¡ ¢ £ € ¥ Š § š © ª « ¬ ® ¯
° ± ² ³ Ž µ ¶ · ž ¹ º » Œ œ Ÿ ¿
À Á Â Ã Ä Å Æ Ç È É Ê Ë Ì Í Î Ï
Ð Ñ Ò Ó Ô Õ Ö × Ø Ù Ú Û Ü Ý Þ ß
à á â ã ä å æ ç è é ê ë ì í î ï
ð ñ ò ó ô õ ö ÷ ø ù ú û ü ý þ ÿ
- Testing LC_MESSAGES with perror(), but it's a libc message.
- Implicitly setting LC_CTYPE by LANG succeeded.
- Implicitly setting LC_NUMERIC by LANG succeeded.
- Implicitly setting LC_TIME by LANG succeeded.
- Implicitly setting LC_COLLATE by LANG succeeded.
- Implicitly setting LC_MONETARY by LANG succeeded.
- Implicitly setting LC_MESSAGES by LANG succeeded.
Mind you, what you will actually see might depend eventual broken
mailer settings, missing characters in fonts etc.
But I can write cedille, ae, oe, a-ring, several vowels with
trema and even € EURO.
c
--
_B A U S T E L L E N_ lesen! --- http://www.blacktrash.org/baustellen.html
Re: Other European languages on a US keyboard
My text was I think misleading. I meant to say that accents were neither here nor there in the arrangement of the keys. The French didn't choose the AZERTY arrangement of the keyboard on the basis of using or not using accents, but only because, presumably, it was the best solution to the stuck hammer problem. At least, that is what I surmised. And, unacquainted with day-to-day English life as most Americans, I don't always know what was decided there and what here (in the US), though I'm never arrogant enough to think that it's all been decided here. (Actually, and despite living in Paris for 6 years, I'm something of an Anglophile, but that's another story--check out my Inspector Morse site at http://www.windofkeltia.com/morse and my Allo, Allo page at http://www.windofkeltia.com/allo .) Russ A.J.Mechelynck wrote: Russell Bateman wrote: Of course, we all realize that the original difference between AZERTY and QWERTY was the analyzed solutions to the problem of the likelihood of two typewriter hammers striking the platen in close enough succession that they would jam together and get stuck. Accents arose as a distinction only because the French decided, based presumably on a letter frequency analysis that AZERTY was the optimal key arrangement based on letter frequency in French words while Americans (I've never noticed what they type on in England) chose QWERTY. It was always a puzzle to me in my childhood as to why the keys weren't arranged in a more obvious fashion. It wasn't answered until, as I was acquainted with the Dvorak key layout, it was explained to me why typewriter keys had been arranged like that in the first place. Of course, now, it's all just tradition--strong enough that the Dvorak guys haven't carried the day and the chording guys are just a lone voice in the wilderness. I don't follow what you're saying about accents (typo?). The French have used accented letters since (IIUC) before Gutenberg invented printing. Yes, the various typewriter keyboards are supposed to be the result of some ergology research, but I don't know the details. IIRC the QWERTY keyboard was invented in England at a time when that was the leading industrial country in the world. W is quite rare in French while -ez is part of the universal second-person-plural ending of verbs; but wouldn't the latter make one think that placing z next to e (well, next on the keyboard, and separated by only S 3 X in the machinery) would cause _more_ jamming in mechanical typewriters? The q is safely away from the u... Best regards, Tony.
Re: Other European languages on a US keyboard
Christian Ebert wrote: * A.J.Mechelynck on Saturday, July 22, 2006 at 22:40:45 +0200: The French oe (o, e-dans-l'o) is not defined in the Latin1 encoding, neither in capitals (as for titles or if the word oeuf [egg] is the first of a sentence), nor in lowercase. You need UTF-8 for it, No. Just latin9 or ISO8859-15 (Look at the header of this mail). Mon cœur. This is on a Mac with a German keyboard, but using actually an American keyboard layout. I enter the œ with Alt-q (the Alt key on Mac keyboard corresponds to the Modifier key on other keyboards I believe). $ echo $LANG en_US.ISO8859-15 [...] Good to know that the Euro sign wasn't the only missing glyph added in ISO 8859-15. There is an Alt key left of the spacebar on i86 machine's keyboards, but I guess you mean the Alt-Gr which is right of the spacebar. (Alt-something is used for menu shortcuts here.) AltGr-q gives me æ (aelig;), with shift Æ (AElig;). I think I'm going to experiment with this AltGr key, apparently it gives a lot of new characters not always mentioned on the keys; and different ones depending on whether it is used alone or with Shift. [after trying] I can't find oelig;, I will have to continue pasting it from Vim when I want it in an email. Best regards, Tony.
RE: Other European languages on a US keyboard
I haven't been following this thread in its entirety, but there are the Windows Alt Keycodes that can solve your entry of the œ symbol, and many others. To enter œ all you need to do is HOLD Alt, and then enter 0156 on the keypad, and then release Alt. Hardly a stylish solution, but easier than copy/pasting from Vim, I'm sure. Max -Original Message- From: A.J.Mechelynck [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Monday, July 24, 2006 3:58 PM To: vim@vim.org Subject: Re: Other European languages on a US keyboard Christian Ebert wrote: * A.J.Mechelynck on Saturday, July 22, 2006 at 22:40:45 +0200: The French oe (o, e-dans-l'o) is not defined in the Latin1 encoding, neither in capitals (as for titles or if the word oeuf [egg] is the first of a sentence), nor in lowercase. You need UTF-8 for it, No. Just latin9 or ISO8859-15 (Look at the header of this mail). Mon cœur. This is on a Mac with a German keyboard, but using actually an American keyboard layout. I enter the œ with Alt-q (the Alt key on Mac keyboard corresponds to the Modifier key on other keyboards I believe). $ echo $LANG en_US.ISO8859-15 [...] Good to know that the Euro sign wasn't the only missing glyph added in ISO 8859-15. There is an Alt key left of the spacebar on i86 machine's keyboards, but I guess you mean the Alt-Gr which is right of the spacebar. (Alt-something is used for menu shortcuts here.) AltGr-q gives me æ (aelig;), with shift Æ (AElig;). I think I'm going to experiment with this AltGr key, apparently it gives a lot of new characters not always mentioned on the keys; and different ones depending on whether it is used alone or with Shift. [after trying] I can't find oelig;, I will have to continue pasting it from Vim when I want it in an email. Best regards, Tony.
Re: Other European languages on a US keyboard
Max Dyckhoff wrote: I haven't been following this thread in its entirety, but there are the Windows Alt Keycodes that can solve your entry of the œ symbol, and many others. To enter œ all you need to do is HOLD Alt, and then enter 0156 on the keypad, and then release Alt. Hardly a stylish solution, but easier than copy/pasting from Vim, I'm sure. Max Except that I never remember those numbers. -Vim is intuitive: To enter œ in Vim, I hit ^Koe (where ^K is Ctrl-K). No weird numbers to remember, just one ctrl-key for all digraphs. And is it possible even on Windows to use codes above 255 (in this case, Alt-0339 I suppose)? -Vim is customizable: When I want to type Russian, I use gvim with my own russian-phonetic_utf-8.vim keymap, where a maps to ah, b to beh, v to veh, g to gheh, etc. No weird keystrokes to remember. -Vim is cross-platform: On this SuSE Linux system, Alt-keypad codes just don't work. Vim, OTOH, works the same on both Windows and Linux. Morality: Don't underrate Vim, especially not on its own mailing list. :-) Best regards, Tony.
Re: Other European languages on a US keyboard
cga2000 wrote: On Mon, Jul 24, 2006 at 05:59:42PM EDT, Christian Ebert wrote: * A.J.Mechelynck on Saturday, July 22, 2006 at 22:40:45 +0200: The French oe (o, e-dans-l'o) is not defined in the Latin1 encoding, neither in capitals (as for titles or if the word oeuf [egg] is the first of a sentence), nor in lowercase. You need UTF-8 for it, No. Just latin9 or ISO8859-15 (Look at the header of this mail). Mon coeur. This is on a Mac with a German keyboard, but using actually an American keyboard layout. I enter the oe with Alt-q (the Alt key on Mac keyboard corresponds to the Modifier key on other keyboards I believe). Could this be Mac-specific? I switched to encoding=latin9. When I do a Ctrl-K o e and a Ctrl-K O E this is what I get: ½ ¼ confirmed by the :dig command. I looked carefully at the output of :dig and I couldn't see our elusive e dans l'o either. So I switched to the French ISO-08859-15, then the US version of latin9.. still can't find that o dans l'e. Strange thing is that the font I use on terminals does have these two characters (upper/lower case E dans l'O..) in the exact same spot Vim displays the above fractions.. Try the following (in gvim): :echo has(multi_byte) the answer should be 1. If it is zero, your version of gvim cannot handle UTF-8. :if tenc== | let tenc = enc | endif | set enc=utf-8 :new then i (set Insert mode) and ^Vu0153 (where ^V is Ctrl-V, unless you use Ctrl-V to paste, in which case it is Ctrl-Q). If you see anything other than the oe digraph, then your 'guifont' is plain wrong. See http://vim.sourceforge.net/tips/tip.php?tip_id=632 about how to choose a better one. Best regards, Tony.
Re: Other European languages on a US keyboard
On Mon, Jul 24, 2006 at 08:29:10PM EDT, A.J.Mechelynck wrote: cga2000 wrote: On Mon, Jul 24, 2006 at 05:59:42PM EDT, Christian Ebert wrote: * A.J.Mechelynck on Saturday, July 22, 2006 at 22:40:45 +0200: The French oe (o, e-dans-l'o) is not defined in the Latin1 encoding, neither in capitals (as for titles or if the word oeuf [egg] is the first of a sentence), nor in lowercase. You need UTF-8 for it, No. Just latin9 or ISO8859-15 (Look at the header of this mail). Mon coeur. This is on a Mac with a German keyboard, but using actually an American keyboard layout. I enter the oe with Alt-q (the Alt key on Mac keyboard corresponds to the Modifier key on other keyboards I believe). Could this be Mac-specific? I switched to encoding=latin9. When I do a Ctrl-K o e and a Ctrl-K O E this is what I get: ½ ¼ confirmed by the :dig command. I looked carefully at the output of :dig and I couldn't see our elusive e dans l'o either. So I switched to the French ISO-08859-15, then the US version of latin9.. still can't find that o dans l'e. Strange thing is that the font I use on terminals does have these two characters (upper/lower case E dans l'O..) in the exact same spot Vim displays the above fractions.. Try the following (in gvim): .. with all the goings-on in this thread I never had a chance to mention the fact that I do not use gvim. I try to do everything in a terminal (under gnu/screen) because text-mode apps were designed for the keyboard so they work a lot better than gui's for those of us who prefer not to use mice. :echo has(multi_byte) the answer should be 1. If it is zero, your version of gvim cannot handle UTF-8. Works fine if I switch my locale to UTF-8. Vim automatically figures what I want and :dig displays the o dans l'e (both the lower and upper case versions) among a gazillon other digraphs. Then I can use the ususal Ctrl-K oe .. save the file.. pass this on to LaTeX and provided I have the correct LaTeX statements to activate UTF-8 (that's what took forever to figure out the other day..) I get my coeurs, voeux and boeufs rendered correctly in xdvi/gv .. *and* the the ensuing printout looks great too. The problem with this is that I haven't found a comfortable way to run Vim in UTF-8 mode and the rest of my stuff in 8-bit mode. Over the week-end I found that I can run Vim in a separate unicode xterm but that's not what I want because I lose screen's copy/paste and more importantly it destroys my attempt at running a fully integrated desktop. Other problems that I have run into is that text files created when in UTF-8 mode are a mess when browsed in latin1/9 mode. I also have problems when I print unicode files.. I once created a nice table with those box-drawing characters that were available in UTF-8 mode and it was really nice on-screen.. but when I tried to print it, all I got was rows and columns of questiion marks. So I switched back to latin1 pending better internationalization support in some applications (slrn, ELinks.. mutt should workd but it's tricky) and maybe more importantly until I acquire a better understanding of running a unicode locale in X/linux and the implications thereof.. :if tenc== | let tenc = enc | endif | set enc=utf-8 :new then i (set Insert mode) and ^Vu0153 (where ^V is Ctrl-V, unless you use Ctrl-V to paste, in which case it is Ctrl-Q). If you see anything other than the oe digraph, then your 'guifont' is plain wrong. See http://vim.sourceforge.net/tips/tip.php?tip_id=632 about how to choose a better one. Well.. actually.. I ran some tests in latin-9 earlier.. trying to figure out this o dans l'e business.. that was on a linux console.. and that's where I realized that I was still running a unicode font.. both on the linux console and in 'X'.. :-) .. It seems I never switched back after my brief incursion into unicode territory.. and since I haven't had any problems displaying and printing text since I switched back.. I would say that the font is ok.. And that UTF-8 stuff is indeed backward-compatible? The font is called terminus and I like it a lot because it looks like a fixed-width version of MS's Verdana, which is my favorite screen font. see http://.geocities.com/cga/wee.png for an excellent screenshot. Thanks cga
Re: Other European languages on a US keyboard
cga2000 wrote: On Mon, Jul 24, 2006 at 08:29:10PM EDT, A.J.Mechelynck wrote: cga2000 wrote: On Mon, Jul 24, 2006 at 05:59:42PM EDT, Christian Ebert wrote: * A.J.Mechelynck on Saturday, July 22, 2006 at 22:40:45 +0200: The French oe (o, e-dans-l'o) is not defined in the Latin1 encoding, neither in capitals (as for titles or if the word oeuf [egg] is the first of a sentence), nor in lowercase. You need UTF-8 for it, No. Just latin9 or ISO8859-15 (Look at the header of this mail). Mon coeur. This is on a Mac with a German keyboard, but using actually an American keyboard layout. I enter the oe with Alt-q (the Alt key on Mac keyboard corresponds to the Modifier key on other keyboards I believe). Could this be Mac-specific? I switched to encoding=latin9. When I do a Ctrl-K o e and a Ctrl-K O E this is what I get: ½ ¼ confirmed by the :dig command. I looked carefully at the output of :dig and I couldn't see our elusive e dans l'o either. So I switched to the French ISO-08859-15, then the US version of latin9.. still can't find that o dans l'e. Strange thing is that the font I use on terminals does have these two characters (upper/lower case E dans l'O..) in the exact same spot Vim displays the above fractions.. Try the following (in gvim): .. with all the goings-on in this thread I never had a chance to mention the fact that I do not use gvim. I try to do everything in a terminal (under gnu/screen) because text-mode apps were designed for the keyboard so they work a lot better than gui's for those of us who prefer not to use mice. Gvim can use keyboard commands just like console Vim, or mice-addicted people can use that too. It has a lot more different coulours (typically 16 million rather than 16) and it can change fonts on-the-fly (change the font from Courier to Lucida to whatever, only through Vim keyboard commands). It can do real boldface and italics, as well as straight or curly underlining. And it can use Unicode: see further down. :echo has(multi_byte) the answer should be 1. If it is zero, your version of gvim cannot handle UTF-8. Works fine if I switch my locale to UTF-8. Vim automatically figures what I want and :dig displays the o dans l'e (both the lower and upper case versions) among a gazillon other digraphs. Then I can use the ususal Ctrl-K oe .. save the file.. pass this on to LaTeX and provided I have the correct LaTeX statements to activate UTF-8 (that's what took forever to figure out the other day..) I get my coeurs, voeux and boeufs rendered correctly in xdvi/gv .. *and* the the ensuing printout looks great too. The problem with this is that I haven't found a comfortable way to run Vim in UTF-8 mode and the rest of my stuff in 8-bit mode. Well, in an xterm (or konsole, or Windows Dos Box), console Vim is dependent on xhatever charset the console is using. If you xterm (or whatever) is in Latin1, you cannot use French oe anymore than you can use Cyrillic or Greek. Gvim, on the other hand, can display anything for which you have a glyph in a font. Over the week-end I found that I can run Vim in a separate unicode xterm but that's not what I want because I lose screen's copy/paste and more importantly it destroys my attempt at running a fully integrated desktop. Other problems that I have run into is that text files created when in UTF-8 mode are a mess when browsed in latin1/9 mode. I also have problems when I print unicode files.. I once created a nice table with those box-drawing characters that were available in UTF-8 mode and it was really nice on-screen.. but when I tried to print it, all I got was rows and columns of questiion marks. So I switched back to latin1 pending better internationalization support in some applications (slrn, ELinks.. mutt should workd but it's tricky) and maybe more importantly until I acquire a better understanding of running a unicode locale in X/linux and the implications thereof.. :if tenc== | let tenc = enc | endif | set enc=utf-8 :new then i (set Insert mode) and ^Vu0153 (where ^V is Ctrl-V, unless you use Ctrl-V to paste, in which case it is Ctrl-Q). If you see anything other than the oe digraph, then your 'guifont' is plain wrong. See http://vim.sourceforge.net/tips/tip.php?tip_id=632 about how to choose a better one. Well.. actually.. I ran some tests in latin-9 earlier.. trying to figure out this o dans l'e business.. that was on a linux console.. and that's where I realized that I was still running a unicode font.. both on the linux console and in 'X'.. :-) .. It seems I never switched back after my brief incursion into unicode territory.. and since I haven't had any problems displaying and printing text since I switched back.. I would say that the font is ok.. And that UTF-8 stuff is indeed backward-compatible? The font is called terminus and I like it a lot because it looks like a fixed-width version of MS's Verdana, which is my favorite screen font. see
Re: Other European languages on a US keyboard
On Sat, Jul 22, 2006 at 04:40:45PM EDT, A.J.Mechelynck wrote: cga2000 wrote: On Fri, Jul 21, 2006 at 03:19:25PM EDT, A.J.Mechelynck wrote: [...] Only minor glitch seems to be that text doesn't wrap when in INSERT (lang) mode.. haven't figured out why yet.. so I just escape out of insert mode and do a gqip once in a while. Could be unrelated though.. Check your options: for auto-insert of linebreaks :verbose set textmode? wrapmargin? :verbose set formatoptions? formatexpr? about display of long lines :verbose set wrap? linebreak? breakat? :verbose set textmode? wrapmargin? textmode wrapmargin=0 :verbose set formatoptions? formatexpr? formatoptions=tcql Last set from /usr/share/vim/vim63/ftplugin/mail.vim E518: Unknown option: formatexpr? :verbose set wrap? linebreak? breakat? wrap nolinebreak breakat= [EMAIL PROTECTED];:,./? Since this non-wrapping behavior only occurs after I issue the :setlocal keymap=accents command, I ran these commands both before and after but the output was strictly identical. As to to he E518: error message, I run Vim 6.3 - that's the version available on debian stable, so I assume that this option was implemented in later versions. But I am writing this message in Vim and I set the keymap to accents and right now everything is wrapping correctly. Don't know if this makes sense but I would appear that the problem only occurs when working on a .tex file? So maybe this is a bug/feature that's related to syntax checking or highlighting? I need to run another test and try to figure out what I was doing. Issue the same above commands while editing latex stuff and see if it makes a difference. I will update the thread if I find something interesting. Or, if none of the distributed keymaps is exactly what you want, you can write your own. It isn't hard. See :help :loadkeymap for the theory, and look at the contents of Bram's $VIMRUNTIME/keymap/accents.vim and my $VIMRUNTIME/keymap/esperanto_utf8.vim for a couple of simple examples. You might want to write something more extensive but this will show you how to do it. Already started on this: copied accents.vim to ~/.vim/keymap/ .. renamed it to foreign.vim and added the Spanish inverted question / exclamation marks - an for now I have mapped to !! and ??. Doesn't look like much is missing.. Maybe the French o+e .. but then my screen font doesn't have it either.. The French oe (o, e-dans-l'o) is not defined in the Latin1 encoding, neither in capitals (as for titles or if the word oeuf [egg] is the first of a sentence), nor in lowercase. You need UTF-8 for it, and for this relatively rare character you can still use Ctrl-K o e ; or else Rare enough .. but besides oeuf is also occurs in such very common words as voeu [wish] and coeur [heart] and it really bothers me when I see them incorrectly spelled in web pages for instance. I spot it and after that I tend to lose focus and not be able to take in what I'm reading for a short while. I'm pretty sure there is also a similar a+e / A+E in French as well, though I could not think of one common word that has this. I'm pretty sure that it's the correct spelling for names such as Aegisthe or Laetitia but I don't have any printed material where I could check that for sure. Only words I can think of right now are caecum and caetera (as in et caetera) but there's bound to be others. you can add the following to your vimrc (after setting 'encoding' to UTF-8): lmap OE Char-338 lmap oe Char-339 The problem with switching to UTF8 is that practically all the other applications that I use on a daily basis do not support it correctly - mutt, slrn, ELinks.. at least not the versions that I am running. I had a go at it a couple of months back but I ran into so many problems that I had to switch back to latin1. Naturally, I could try to run Vim in a UTF8-capable terminal like uxterm while staying with a latin1 locale - I understand that this might work - but now that I have gotten used to the convenience of running all these apps under gnu/screen under a single xterm I don't think I would want to fire up Vim in a separate xterm on a regular basis. Printing was another area where I ran into problems. So, due to my ignorance of such matters and lack of time I'll have to keep this on the back burner until either the apps are more mature and do unicode out-of-the-box.. or until I have the time to look into this and acquire a better understanding of the issues. I'm using language mappings here so they will be turned on and off together with the keymap. Come to think of it, French would appear to have the most annoying spelling system of the West European languages that I have some degree of familiarity with. Spanish, Italian, and German seem to use fewer non-ASCII characters. In order to set up my foreign language keymap correctly I would really need
Re: Other European languages on a US keyboard
cga2000 wrote: On Sat, Jul 22, 2006 at 04:40:45PM EDT, A.J.Mechelynck wrote: cga2000 wrote: On Fri, Jul 21, 2006 at 03:19:25PM EDT, A.J.Mechelynck wrote: [...] Only minor glitch seems to be that text doesn't wrap when in INSERT (lang) mode.. haven't figured out why yet.. so I just escape out of insert mode and do a gqip once in a while. Could be unrelated though.. Check your options: for auto-insert of linebreaks :verbose set textmode? wrapmargin? :verbose set formatoptions? formatexpr? about display of long lines :verbose set wrap? linebreak? breakat? :verbose set textmode? wrapmargin? textmode wrapmargin=0 ...oops... verbose set textwidth? wrapmargin? and (seeing what you write below) do it with with the active cursor in a Latex file. Maybe the Latex ftplugin changes textwidth? (A value of zero means no auto-reformatting.) :verbose set formatoptions? formatexpr? formatoptions=tcql Last set from /usr/share/vim/vim63/ftplugin/mail.vim :help fo-table will tell you what these flags mean. E518: Unknown option: formatexpr? :verbose set wrap? linebreak? breakat? wrap nolinebreak breakat= [EMAIL PROTECTED];:,./? Since this non-wrapping behavior only occurs after I issue the :setlocal keymap=accents command, I ran these commands both before and after but the output was strictly identical. As to to he E518: error message, I run Vim 6.3 - that's the version available on debian stable, so I assume that this option was implemented in later versions. 'formatexpr' is new in version 7. BTW, you can get both 6.4 and 7.0 from the Vim FTP site. The current version is 7.0.039. Compiling Vim is not really hard -- see my http://users.skynet.be/antoine.mechelynck/vim/compunix.htm for details. But I am writing this message in Vim and I set the keymap to accents and right now everything is wrapping correctly. Don't know if this makes sense but I would appear that the problem only occurs when working on a .tex file? So maybe this is a bug/feature that's related to syntax checking or highlighting? I need to run another test and try to figure out what I was doing. Issue the same above commands while editing latex stuff and see if it makes a difference. I will update the thread if I find something interesting. Or, if none of the distributed keymaps is exactly what you want, you can write your own. It isn't hard. See :help :loadkeymap for the theory, and look at the contents of Bram's $VIMRUNTIME/keymap/accents.vim and my $VIMRUNTIME/keymap/esperanto_utf8.vim for a couple of simple examples. You might want to write something more extensive but this will show you how to do it. Already started on this: copied accents.vim to ~/.vim/keymap/ .. renamed it to foreign.vim and added the Spanish inverted question / exclamation marks - an for now I have mapped to !! and ??. Doesn't look like much is missing.. Maybe the French o+e .. but then my screen font doesn't have it either.. The French oe (o, e-dans-l'o) is not defined in the Latin1 encoding, neither in capitals (as for titles or if the word oeuf [egg] is the first of a sentence), nor in lowercase. You need UTF-8 for it, and for this relatively rare character you can still use Ctrl-K o e ; or else Rare enough .. but besides oeuf is also occurs in such very common words as voeu [wish] and coeur [heart] and it really bothers me when I see them incorrectly spelled in web pages for instance. I spot it and after that I tend to lose focus and not be able to take in what I'm reading for a short while. I'm pretty sure there is also a similar a+e / A+E in French as well, though I could not think of one common word that has this. I'm pretty sure that it's the correct spelling for names such as Aegisthe or Laetitia but I don't have any printed material where I could check that for sure. Only words I can think of right now are caecum and caetera (as in et caetera) but there's bound to be others. you can add the following to your vimrc (after setting 'encoding' to UTF-8): lmap OE Char-338 lmap oe Char-339 The problem with switching to UTF8 is that practically all the other applications that I use on a daily basis do not support it correctly - mutt, slrn, ELinks.. at least not the versions that I am running. I had a go at it a couple of months back but I ran into so many problems that I had to switch back to latin1. Naturally, I could try to run Vim in a UTF8-capable terminal like uxterm while staying with a latin1 locale - I understand that this might work - but now that I have gotten used to the convenience of running all these apps under gnu/screen under a single xterm I don't think I would want to fire up Vim in a separate xterm on a regular basis. If your other applications don't support UTF-8 you will have to do without the OE and oe digraphs. Printing was another area where I ran into problems. So, due to my ignorance of
Re: Other European languages on a US keyboard
On Fri, Jul 21, 2006 at 03:19:25PM EDT, A.J.Mechelynck wrote: cga2000 wrote: I sometimes need to write text in other languages such as French, Spanish and occasionally German or Italian. I would like to do this in Vim. Unfortunately I only have a US keyboard. [..] I. Since you've already used digraphs, and they're too cumbersome for you, you could try a keymap. There are some keymaps in $VIMRUNTIME/keymap which you can apply by just doing :setlocal keymap=keymapname (where keymapname is the filename without the encoding and .vim endings) or by using the Edit - Keymap menu. Then you can toggle between US-QWERTY mode and keymap mode by hitting Ctrl-^ in Insert mode, or by toggling 'iminsert' between zero and 1 in any mode. Basically, what a keymap does is establish a set of language-mappings, i.e., insert-mode mappings which can be turned on an off. Try the accents keymap, it might be just what you want. This works great..! I tried that on a short text in French and within a couple of minutes I was almost as comfortable as I am when typing in English. The accents are all perfectly intuitive - ` ' ^ etc. so I didn't even need to look at the keymap. Just need to be a little patient when entering an apostrophe. Only minor glitch seems to be that text doesn't wrap when in INSERT (lang) mode.. haven't figured out why yet.. so I just escape out of insert mode and do a gqip once in a while. Could be unrelated though.. Or, if none of the distributed keymaps is exactly what you want, you can write your own. It isn't hard. See :help :loadkeymap for the theory, and look at the contents of Bram's $VIMRUNTIME/keymap/accents.vim and my $VIMRUNTIME/keymap/esperanto_utf8.vim for a couple of simple examples. You might want to write something more extensive but this will show you how to do it. Doesn't look like much is missing.. Maybe the French o+e .. but then my screen font doesn't have it either.. If and when you write your own keymap, place it in the keymap/ subdirectory of a directory listed early in 'runtimepath' but not in $VIMRUNTIME/keymap itself because any upgrade can silently change anything there. II. What you are suggesting looks like setting 'spelllang' (with three ells) to whatever means French and then spellchecking your US-ASCII-only text. But beware: the Vim spellchecker (which I don't use because of my good innate spelling) might not be clever enough to mark words which have accented homographs, such as a (has) vs. à (at), de (of) vs. dé (thimble), du (of the) vs. dû (owed), cru (believed or raw) vs. crû (grown) etc.: so the cure might be worse than the ill, owing to the necessity of looking for unmarked spelling mistakes even after running the spell checker. I think you're right. Considering how effective the keymap solution is there's just no point. Anyway, I don't even have an active spellchecker at this point. aspell segfaults for some reason and I haven't had time to research that yet. Just need to figure out how I can get latex to handle these non-ASCII characters. They disappear from the .dvi file. In case I can't figure it out, there's probably a latex user list somewhere. Great Tip..! Thanks cga
Re: Other European languages on a US keyboard
On Fri, Jul 21, 2006 at 05:19:33PM EDT, Yakov Lerner wrote: On 7/21/06, cga2000 [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: [..] I think the easiest apporach is to craete mappings. You could use ctrl-(a-z), ctrl-shift(a-z), ctrl-alt-(a-z), then f1-f12 + ctrl/alt/del combinations. Thanks, but not for me.. I touch type and as a result Tony's solution is much preferable than key combos. Linux has a keyboard mode where ' is used to modify letters to create diactitics. This works for all X applications, not just vim. I have used the Compose key in the past - usually mapped to menu.. I think I remapped it to the Windows key on this laptop at one point but I wasn't aware of this X keyboard mode. Thanks cga
Re: Other European languages on a US keyboard
On Fri, Jul 21, 2006 at 02:50:46PM EDT, Gene Kwiecinski wrote: Unfortunately I am only able to type the US keyboard, so remapping the keyboard might be a better solution than entering digraphs in the long run but will not be painless.. And since I do not do this on a regular basis, I am unsure whether it's really worth going to all the trouble. Would it be impractical to map, eg, ^e to whatever the code is for 'ê', ie, use prefix notation of [^'`~,], etc., as a prefix for [aeioucnAEIOUCN] as needed? Wouldn't be *all* those combinations, but, eg, would only need ,C for Ccedil;, ~N for Ntilde; (and their lowercase counterparts, natch), but the rest would just be whatever accented chars you normally use, for grave, acute, circumflex, etc. Unless I'm mistaken you have actually reinvented the loadkeymap solution discussed by Tony..? Don't take me wrong.. I am *not* being ironical.. Quite the contrary. I'm not sure how a non-US keyboard does such things, so I can't suggest a more transparent way of doing it. One other possibility would be the way my phone does multiple chars per key, eg, you'd hit '1' to get the generic '.', then '*' would cycle through different punctuation, and so on, 'til it'd get back to '.' again. Maybe hitting alt-A would get you an 'a' and put you into a loop, then multiple hits of an F-key would cycle through the 3-4 other chars and then back. Any other key would escape the loop. Arrange them in the order you expect their occurrence, most commonly-used ones first. That, I had thought of but I discarded it as impractical. That's also the method that's commonly used to input languages that have too many characters to fit on a reasonably-sized keyboard.. Chinese, eg. Entering the accent, tilde, cedilla.. etc. followed by the letter is a lot more in keeping with the wiring of my cortex.. Eg, if you arrange them in the order acute/grave/circumflex/ring, simply hitting M-a would get you aacute;. Hit F2, and it gets you agrave;. Hit F2 again, circumflex. Again, ring. Again, acute. Lather, rinse, repeat. *Implementing* this would for now be beyond my ken, or my barbie, but I'm sure someone might have some ideas how to best do it. No? Thanks cga
Re: Other European languages on a US keyboard
cga2000 wrote: On Fri, Jul 21, 2006 at 03:19:25PM EDT, A.J.Mechelynck wrote: [...] Only minor glitch seems to be that text doesn't wrap when in INSERT (lang) mode.. haven't figured out why yet.. so I just escape out of insert mode and do a gqip once in a while. Could be unrelated though.. Check your options: for auto-insert of linebreaks :verbose set textmode? wrapmargin? :verbose set formatoptions? formatexpr? about display of long lines :verbose set wrap? linebreak? breakat? Or, if none of the distributed keymaps is exactly what you want, you can write your own. It isn't hard. See :help :loadkeymap for the theory, and look at the contents of Bram's $VIMRUNTIME/keymap/accents.vim and my $VIMRUNTIME/keymap/esperanto_utf8.vim for a couple of simple examples. You might want to write something more extensive but this will show you how to do it. Doesn't look like much is missing.. Maybe the French o+e .. but then my screen font doesn't have it either.. The French oe (o, e-dans-l'o) is not defined in the Latin1 encoding, neither in capitals (as for titles or if the word oeuf [egg] is the first of a sentence), nor in lowercase. You need UTF-8 for it, and for this relatively rare character you can still use Ctrl-K o e ; or else you can add the following to your vimrc (after setting 'encoding' to UTF-8): lmap OE Char-338 lmap oe Char-339 I'm using language mappings here so they will be turned on and off together with the keymap. If and when you write your own keymap, place it in the keymap/ subdirectory of a directory listed early in 'runtimepath' but not in $VIMRUNTIME/keymap itself because any upgrade can silently change anything there. II. What you are suggesting looks like setting 'spelllang' (with three ells) to whatever means French and then spellchecking your US-ASCII-only text. But beware: the Vim spellchecker (which I don't use because of my good innate spelling) might not be clever enough to mark words which have accented homographs, such as a (has) vs. à (at), de (of) vs. dé (thimble), du (of the) vs. dû (owed), cru (believed or raw) vs. crû (grown) etc.: so the cure might be worse than the ill, owing to the necessity of looking for unmarked spelling mistakes even after running the spell checker. I think you're right. Considering how effective the keymap solution is there's just no point. Anyway, I don't even have an active spellchecker at this point. aspell segfaults for some reason and I haven't had time to research that yet. Vim 7 has a built-in spell checker. I don't use it, but I know it is there. I guess :helpgrep spell might tell you about it if you're interested. Just need to figure out how I can get latex to handle these non-ASCII characters. They disappear from the .dvi file. In case I can't figure it out, there's probably a latex user list somewhere. Great Tip..! Thanks cga My pleasure. Best regards, Tony.
Other European languages on a US keyboard
I sometimes need to write text in other languages such as French, Spanish and occasionally German or Italian. I would like to do this in Vim. Unfortunately I only have a US keyboard. Using Ctrl-K to enter the various digraphs becomes somewhat cumbersome for anything larger than a short paragraph. Unfortunately I am only able to type the US keyboard, so remapping the keyboard might be a better solution than entering digraphs in the long run but will not be painless.. And since I do not do this on a regular basis, I am unsure whether it's really worth going to all the trouble. I was thinking of writing the text without accents, tildes, cedillas, etc. using the letters on the US keyboard and then feeding the result to some advanced functionality of a spellchecker that would replace all the words that can only be spelled one way by their correctly spelled version - say French 'épeler (to spell) can only be spelled this way.. there is no 'epeler' or 'èpeler' or 'êpeler'. On the other hand, for those words where the accent differs depending on the semantics such as French 'a' vs. 'à', the script/plugin would leave them untouched and - ideally - highlight them, thus leaving me with only a handful of manual corrections. Is there anything in Vim that does something like this? Or is there any other 'smart' way to achieve something like the above? Thanks cga
RE: Other European languages on a US keyboard
Unfortunately I am only able to type the US keyboard, so remapping the keyboard might be a better solution than entering digraphs in the long run but will not be painless.. And since I do not do this on a regular basis, I am unsure whether it's really worth going to all the trouble. Would it be impractical to map, eg, ^e to whatever the code is for 'ê', ie, use prefix notation of [^'`~,], etc., as a prefix for [aeioucnAEIOUCN] as needed? Wouldn't be *all* those combinations, but, eg, would only need ,C for Ccedil;, ~N for Ntilde; (and their lowercase counterparts, natch), but the rest would just be whatever accented chars you normally use, for grave, acute, circumflex, etc. I'm not sure how a non-US keyboard does such things, so I can't suggest a more transparent way of doing it. One other possibility would be the way my phone does multiple chars per key, eg, you'd hit '1' to get the generic '.', then '*' would cycle through different punctuation, and so on, 'til it'd get back to '.' again. Maybe hitting alt-A would get you an 'a' and put you into a loop, then multiple hits of an F-key would cycle through the 3-4 other chars and then back. Any other key would escape the loop. Arrange them in the order you expect their occurrence, most commonly-used ones first. Eg, if you arrange them in the order acute/grave/circumflex/ring, simply hitting M-a would get you aacute;. Hit F2, and it gets you agrave;. Hit F2 again, circumflex. Again, ring. Again, acute. Lather, rinse, repeat. *Implementing* this would for now be beyond my ken, or my barbie, but I'm sure someone might have some ideas how to best do it. No?
Re: Other European languages on a US keyboard
cga2000 wrote: I sometimes need to write text in other languages such as French, Spanish and occasionally German or Italian. I would like to do this in Vim. Unfortunately I only have a US keyboard. Using Ctrl-K to enter the various digraphs becomes somewhat cumbersome for anything larger than a short paragraph. Unfortunately I am only able to type the US keyboard, so remapping the keyboard might be a better solution than entering digraphs in the long run but will not be painless.. And since I do not do this on a regular basis, I am unsure whether it's really worth going to all the trouble. I was thinking of writing the text without accents, tildes, cedillas, etc. using the letters on the US keyboard and then feeding the result to some advanced functionality of a spellchecker that would replace all the words that can only be spelled one way by their correctly spelled version - say French 'épeler (to spell) can only be spelled this way.. there is no 'epeler' or 'èpeler' or 'êpeler'. On the other hand, for those words where the accent differs depending on the semantics such as French 'a' vs. 'à', the script/plugin would leave them untouched and - ideally - highlight them, thus leaving me with only a handful of manual corrections. Is there anything in Vim that does something like this? Or is there any other 'smart' way to achieve something like the above? Thanks cga I. Since you've already used digraphs, and they're too cumbersome for you, you could try a keymap. There are some keymaps in $VIMRUNTIME/keymap which you can apply by just doing :setlocal keymap=keymapname (where keymapname is the filename without the encoding and .vim endings) or by using the Edit - Keymap menu. Then you can toggle between US-QWERTY mode and keymap mode by hitting Ctrl-^ in Insert mode, or by toggling 'iminsert' between zero and 1 in any mode. Basically, what a keymap does is establish a set of language-mappings, i.e., insert-mode mappings which can be turned on an off. Try the accents keymap, it might be just what you want. Or, if none of the distributed keymaps is exactly what you want, you can write your own. It isn't hard. See :help :loadkeymap for the theory, and look at the contents of Bram's $VIMRUNTIME/keymap/accents.vim and my $VIMRUNTIME/keymap/esperanto_utf8.vim for a couple of simple examples. You might want to write something more extensive but this will show you how to do it. If and when you write your own keymap, place it in the keymap/ subdirectory of a directory listed early in 'runtimepath' but not in $VIMRUNTIME/keymap itself because any upgrade can silently change anything there. II. What you are suggesting looks like setting 'spelllang' (with three ells) to whatever means French and then spellchecking your US-ASCII-only text. But beware: the Vim spellchecker (which I don't use because of my good innate spelling) might not be clever enough to mark words which have accented homographs, such as a (has) vs. à (at), de (of) vs. dé (thimble), du (of the) vs. dû (owed), cru (believed or raw) vs. crû (grown) etc.: so the cure might be worse than the ill, owing to the necessity of looking for unmarked spelling mistakes even after running the spell checker. Best regards, Tony.
Re: Other European languages on a US keyboard
On 7/21/06, cga2000 [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: I sometimes need to write text in other languages such as French, Spanish and occasionally German or Italian. I would like to do this in Vim. Unfortunately I only have a US keyboard. Using Ctrl-K to enter the various digraphs becomes somewhat cumbersome for anything larger than a short paragraph. Unfortunately I am only able to type the US keyboard, so remapping the keyboard might be a better solution than entering digraphs in the long run but will not be painless.. And since I do not do this on a regular basis, I am unsure whether it's really worth going to all the trouble. I was thinking of writing the text without accents, tildes, cedillas, etc. using the letters on the US keyboard and then feeding the result to some advanced functionality of a spellchecker that would replace all the words that can only be spelled one way by their correctly spelled version - say French 'épeler (to spell) can only be spelled this way.. there is no 'epeler' or 'èpeler' or 'êpeler'. On the other hand, for those words where the accent differs depending on the semantics such as French 'a' vs. 'à', the script/plugin would leave them untouched and - ideally - highlight them, thus leaving me with only a handful of manual corrections. Is there anything in Vim that does something like this? Or is there any other 'smart' way to achieve something like the above? I think the easiest apporach is to craete mappings. You could use ctrl-(a-z), ctrl-shift(a-z), ctrl-alt-(a-z), then f1-f12 + ctrl/alt/del combinations. Linux has a keyboard mode where ' is used to modify letters to create diactitics. This works for all X applications, not just vim. Yakov
