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
