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Man Campaigns For Addition of 'Th' Key To Keyboard
beaverdownunder writes "Melbourne restauranteur Paul Mathis has developed a one-character replacement for the word 'The' – effectively an upper-case 'T' and a lower-case 'h' bunched together so they share the upright stem – and an app that puts it in everyone's hand by allowing users to download an entirely new keyboard complete not just with his 'Th' symbol, but also a row of keys containing the 10 or 15 (depending on the version) most frequently typed words in English. Mathis has already copped criticism from people who claim he is attempting to trademark a symbol that is part of the Serbian Cyrillic alphabet (pronounced 'tshe,' the letter represents the 'ch' sound found in the word 'chew')."
What teh hell is his problem? We don't need anotehr key on out keyboards.
Thorn already exists as an obsolete form of "th". I don't think it will work it I try to enter it here, but here goes..
Never email donotemail@WeAreSpammers.com
I insist on the return of thorn and eth to the language! If only slashdot's character support wasn't utterly broken, I could type them here...
For most people, it's not the layout of the keyboard that's slowing them down, but rather the lack of effort in trying to learn proper typing techniques. You could probably put the keyboard in the worst possible configuration ever, with all Q,Z, V, and X all in the home row, and people could still learn to type sufficiently fast on it.
Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.
I'd say that it is because most people could not care less and QWERTY is status quo. QWERTY will have to cause cancer before anyone cares enough to change it. That or someone with a burning desire to push Dvorak gets their hands on a lot of power.
On the bright side, no one is going to start using this change either. As other posters have pointed out, we used to have the Thorn character, and there's a reason we don't anymore.
Because there isn't definitive proof dvorak is faster even for physical keyboards (studies differ on if there's any gain), much less for 1-2 finger tap keyboards like on a phone. Because the world is used to qwerty and the costs of retraining in dvorak dwarf the lifetime gain of dvorak, if there actually is any. Because the fastest method of input on phones so far is to actually not type at all, but use a Swype-like mechanism and/or heavy prediction, which actually work worse with a dvorak keyboard.
I don't really think this is a huge gain either, but the Dvorak as second coming thing annoys the hell out of me.
I still have more fans than freaks. WTF is wrong with you people?
It's probably easy to learn, but if you want to maximize input speed, this guy sort of has the right idea, that consolidating common inputs into single units is the way to go to speed up entry. However stenographers have already come up with much more complete stenotype systems, used mainly by court reporters. The downside is that it's a bit esoteric to learn, moreso than Dvorak.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
QWERTY will have to cause cancer before anyone cares enough to change it
Yeah, but cancer is a vague threat at some point in the future. I need to get work done NOW, so I'm sticking with it.
IOW even the threat of cancer won't get people to change :)
SJW n. One who posts facts.
I would like to put forward a letter of my own to this man.
y?
"I'm not a procrastinator, I'm temporally challenged"
I'd like to start a petition to include a "Teh" key on all standard keyboards, who's with me?
Are YOU using the TOOL, or is the TOOL using YOU? Think about it!
He should really campaign for touch typing literacy first. Someone having to switch back and forth between looking at their screen and their keyboard will slow them down far more than a few extra keystrokes.
Seriously, I still fail to understand why the Qwerty keyboard still is the norm, even in virtual keyboard in mobile devices.
What's the problem with pushing a better keyboard like Dvorak? wouldn't that be a better improvement over just adding 'th' or other minor fixes?
Because the original studies were biased at best, and follow up studies found there are no cost benefits to retraining with Dvorak:
In the first phase of the experiment, 10 government typists were retrained on the Dvorak keyboard. It took well over 25 days of four-hour-a-day training for these typists to catch up to their old QWERTY speeds. (Compare this to the Navy study's results.) When the typists had finally caught up to their old speeds, the second phase of the experiment began. The newly trained Dvorak typists continued training and a group of 10 QWERTY typists (matched in skill to the Dvorak typists) began a parallel program to improve their skills. In this second phase the Dvorak typists progressed less quickly with further Dvorak training than did QWERTY typists training on QWERTY keyboards. Thus Strong concluded that Dvorak training would never be able to amortize its costs. He recommended instead that the government provide further training in the QWERTY keyboard for QWERTY typists.
The GSA study attempted to control carefully for the abilities and treatments of the two groups. The study design directly paralleled the decision that a real firm or a real government agency might face: Is it worthwhile to retrain its present typists? If Strong's study is correct, it is not efficient for current typists to switch to Dvorak. The study also implied that the eventual typing speed would be greater with QWERTY than with Dvorak, although this conclusion was not emphasized.
Much of the other evidence that has been used to support Dvorak's superiority actually can be used to make a case against Dvorak. We have the 1953 Australian Post Office study already mentioned, which needed to remove psychological impediments to superior performance. A 1973 study based on six typists at Western Electric found that after 104 hours of training on Dvorak, typists were 2.6 percent faster than they had been on QWERTY. Similarly, a 1978 study at Oregon State University indicated that after 100 hours of training, typists were up to 97.6 percent of their old QWERTY speed. Both of these retraining times are similar to those reported by Strong but not to those in the Navy study. But unlike Strong's study neither of these studies included parallel retraining on QWERTY keyboards. As Strong points out, even experienced QWERTY typists increase their speed on QWERTY if they are given additional training.
Ergonomic studies also confirm that the advantages of Dvorak are either small or nonexistent. For example, A. Miller and J Thomas, two researchers at the IBM Research Laboratory, writing in the International Journal of Man-Machine Studies, conclude that "no alternative has shown a realistically significant advantage over the QWERTY for general purpose typing." Other studies based on analysis of hand-and-finger motions find differences of only a few percentage points between Dvorak and QWERTY. The consistent finding in ergonomic studies is that the results imply no clear advantage for Dvorak, and certainly no advantage of the magnitude that is so often claimed.
Say hello to the Chinese keyboard.
ay @gri wIT yu k@mplitli. @nfOrtS@n@tli, wEbsAyts layk sl{SdAt wont lEt mi tayp D@ k@rEkt k{rIkt@rz, so ay h{d tu yus SAMPA InstEd.
The "Any" key would be far more useful.
BECAUSE WE ARE STILL BEARING SOME OF THE SCARS OF OUR BRIEF SKIRMISH with II-B English, it is natural that we should be enchanted by Mr. George Bernard Shaw's current campaign for a simplified alphabet.
Obviously, as Mr. Shaw points out, English spelling is in much need of a general overhauling and streamlining. However, our own resistance to any changes requiring a large expenditure of mental effort in the near future would cause us to view with some apprehension the possibility of some day receiving a morning paper printed in-to us-Greek.
Our own plan would achieve the same end as the legislation proposed by Mr. Shaw, but in a less shocking manner, as it consists merely of an acceleration of the normal processes by which the language is continually modernized.
As a catalytic agent, we would suggest that a National Easy Language Week be proclaimed, which the President would inaugurate, outlining some short cut to concentrate on during the week, and to be adopted during the ensuing year. All school children would be given a holiday, the lost time being the equivalent of that gained by the spelling short cut.
In 1946, for example, we would urge the elimination of the soft c, for which we would substitute "s." Sertainly, such an improvement would be selebrated in all sivic-minded sircles as being suffisiently worth the trouble, and students in all sities in the land would be reseptive to- ward any change eliminating the nesessity of learning the differense be- tween the two letters.
In 1947, sinse only the hard "c" would be left, it would be possible to substitute "k" for it, both letters being pronounsed identikally. Imagine how greatly only two years of this prosess would klarify the konfusion in the minds of students. Already we would have eliminated an entire letter from the alphabet. Typewriters and linotypes, kould all be built with one less letter, and a11 the manpower and materials previously devoted to making "c's" kould be turned toward raising the national standard of living.
In the fase of so many notable improvements, it is easy to foresee that by 1948, "National Easy Language Week" would be a pronounsed sukses. All skhool tshildren would be looking forward with konsiderable exsitement to the holiday, and in a blaze of national publisity it would be announsed that the double konsonant "ph" no longer existed, and that the sound would henseforth be written "f" in all words, This would make sutsh words as "fonograf" twenty persent shorter in print.
By 1949, public interest in a fonetik alfabet kan be expekted to have inkreased to the point where a more radikal step forward kan be taken without fear of undue kritisism. We would therefore urge the elimination, at that time of al unesesary double leters, whitsh, although quite harmles, have always ben a nuisanse in the language and a desided deterent to akurate speling. Try it yourself in the next leter you write, and se if both writing and reading are not fasilitated.
With so mutsh progres already made, it might be posible in 1950 to delve further into the posibilities of fonetik speling. After due konsidera- tion of the reseption aforded the previous steps, it should be expedient by this time to spel al difthongs fonetikaly. Most students do not realize that the long "i" and "y," as in "time" and "by," are aktualy the difthong "ai," as it is writen in "aisle" and that the long "a" in "fate," is in reality the difthong "ei" as in "rein." Although perhaps not imediately aparent, the saving in taime and efort wil be tremendous when we leiter elimineite the sailent "e," as meide posible bai this last tsheinge.
For, as is wel known, the horible mes of "e's' apearing in our writen language is kaused prinsipaly bai the present nes
The comfort comes from that comfortable feeling that you are special and better than everyone else because you use a special keyboard.
I got a job offer last week and as part of my salary negotiations I demanded Dvorak keyboards. I still haven't heard back.
I object to power without constructive purpose. --Spock
English spelling leans diachronic, meaning that a 'c' represents an underlying 'c' in the language from which a word was borrowed. For example, 'c' is pronounced differently in "focus" and "foci", but the use of the same letter allows readers to associate the plural with the same word's singular.
Besides, you don't need to free up 's' when there's a perfectly good symbol for the sound in the middle of "fishin'" and "fission": the integral sign.
As Gutenberg was German, the first printing presses only had letters as required for German. Discarding the umlauts from the printing presses imported from Germany was easy, but creating new letter types for eth and thorn was tricky. An initial workaround for eth was to use y because in certain handwritings the two looked similar. Later they used th for both eth and thorn.
I'd submit that the biggest change that mobile keyboards need is to move letters that are similarly replaceable in words further apart.
For instance:
bit
but
bot
The three vowels are packed together. Regardless of your input method, you'll probably have to place your finger over more than one of those letters. It doesn't help to have autocorrect either, since it's just as likely to provide a valid but incorrect choice--unless the system has contextual correction. Ideally, the vowels should be as far spread apart as possible. Other similarly replaceable letters should also be moved apart. Letters that rarely replace one another (a and z, say) should be close together. I've got pretty slender fingers and I still mistype all over the place. The iPhone's autocorrect is quite good, and appears to me to autocorrect based on what side of the letter you typed (that is, it seems to be able to tell the difference between you typing on the left side of i or the right, allowing it to occasionally correctly guess between 'but' and 'bot', even if you put your finger mostly on the i) but even still, it's too easy to confuse the letters.