In the context of Tamazight input Philippe Verdy wrote: [ . . . ] > > There are probably some existing standard for keyboard mappings, promoted by > UNESCO and published in a ISO standard.
If there were such a thing (for Tamazight or any other African language) I'd be very interested to know about it. My impression is that there are no such standards for African languages that use extended Latin characters. In fact SIL is apparently working with UNESCO on a proposed keyboard layout for African languages precisely because there is not yet any such standardization. See http://scripts.sil.org/cms/scripts/page.php? site_id=nrsi&item_id=AfricanKeyboard1 . Likewise, part of the reason for all the effort re keyboards that you see at http://www.bisharat.net/A12N/Projects/ is that there lack any standards. Ultimately, however, we may be talking about not one keyboard that covers all languages nor keyboards for each language, but, as Marcel Diki-Kidiri of CNRS has suggested elsewhere, several layouts that would each cover a region or number of countries and all the languages therein. This may be a bit off-topic for the Unicode list but is definitely on-topic for the a12n-collaboration group for any who want to pursue it there. Don Osborn Bisharat.net
