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France Says AZERTY Keyboards Fail French Typists (arstechnica.com)
Ars Technica reports that the AZERTY keyboard layout used in France has a problem: it's not very good for writing French words, many of which require accents that can be accessed only awkwardly. An excerpt from the Ars story: In a statement released this week, the ministry lamented the fact that French keyboards, which use the AZERTY layout rather than the QWERTY layout familiar to English speakers, make it unnecessarily difficult to type common symbols and letters. While the 26 letters of the alphabet as well as common accented letters like é, à, è, and ù are generally represented similarly on an AZERTY keyboard, the ministry said that the @ symbol and the € symbol are inconveniently or inconsistently placed, as are commands to capitalize symbols like "ç".
The trouble of finding how to properly capitalize accented letters is a big issue in written French, especially for legal texts and government documents where every letter of the names of people and businesses are capitalized. Often, an accent is the only distinguishing factor between two similarly spelled words.
...QWERTY has been failing English typists for over a century!
Not sure what you are talking about. The point here is that French people can't properly type their own language on their keyboards. It's not about legislating the language, it's about being able to type it correctly. Not using a word because you can't type it easily is annoying. As is realizing that because you didn't type the accented version of a letter, your sentence changes meaning. In short, it's about giving people control so that they can actually write whatever they want.
~~~ Paf. Le chien.
I technically know how to type both on German and US keyboards. In practice, I find German layouts to be incredibly tedious -- even when typing German.
I much rather prefer a US keyboard layout and a working "Compose" key. Typing accented character is very straight forward and logical when composing the character from its underlying parts. Yes, it requires multiple keystrokes to type a single character; but I have gotten pretty fast at typing those.
Alternatively, some of my friends/relatives have switched to a US layout and refuse to enter native accented characters altogether. German officially sanctions the use of substitutes "ä" becomes "ae", "Ö" becomes "Oe" and "ß" becomes "ss". Maybe, the French should come up with a similar system.
Have you maybe thought that other languages use accents and extra letters because they need them to describe phonemes that are not used in English?
~~~ Paf. Le chien.
They noticed that people were leaving accents off initial capitals because they're hard to type, leading others to assume that accents weren't needed on initial capitals, thus changing the language. Presumably the increasing use of keyboards has worsened the problem.