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.

Comments

Zimply yooz Qwerty

[Viol8]

I 'av ner problem typing zee french on zis keyberd layoot!

Re: Zimply yooz Qwerty

[WarJolt]

Wrong. Clearly you have your keyboard misconfigured in dvorak mode.

Re: Zimply yooz Qwerty

[BarbaraHudson]

Hey tabernac! Watt ees dis sh*t you be saying. Der eez no problem witt making de Français on these there key bohrds. No vrai frenchie need to be making dee excuse for to be able to give you dee french accen on any of dem dere key bore, hokay you maudit tete-carré bloke?

Re:Zimply yooz Qwerty

[mjwx]

I 'av ner problem typing zee french on zis keyberd layoot!

Speak for yourself, I have always found the "snooty" key too far to reach, considering the amount I need that accent when typing French.

Re: Zimply yooz Qwerty

[JoeMerchant]

The whole point of "erty" keyboards is to slow down the typists and reduce key-jams. It's an intentionally bad standard which has lived beyond its meaningfulness for more than 30 years now (when was the last manual typewriter made?)

Re: Zimply yooz Qwerty

[GabeGhearing]

The whole point of "erty" keyboards is to slow down the typists and reduce key-jams. It's an intentionally bad standard which has lived beyond its meaningfulness for more than 30 years now (when was the last manual typewriter made?)

That's a myth: http://www.straightdope.com/co...

Re: Zimply yooz Qwerty

[JoeMerchant]

Interesting, but:

at least one study indicates that placing commonly used keys far apart, as with the QWERTY, actually speeds typing, since you frequently alternate hands; and (4) the QWERTY keyboard did not become a standard overnight but beat out several competing keyboards over a period of years. Thus it may be fairly said to represent the considered choice of the marketplace.

seems almost as weak as they are portraying the QWERTY myth to be... Even if QWERTY won over competing keyboards, it won during the reign of mechanical typewriters, so it is a standard from the mechanical keyboard age. I actually "learned to type on a manual" in 1981... it's a very different animal from electronic keyboards.

Re: Zimply yooz Qwerty

[Anonymous Coward]

The European Commission has announced an agreement whereby English will be the official language of the EU, rather than German, which was the other contender. Her Majesty's Government conceded that English spelling had room for improvement and has therefore accepted a five-year phasing in of "Euro-English".

In the first year, "s" will replace the soft "c". Sertainly, this will make sivil servants jump for joy. The hard "c" will be dropped in favour of the "k", Which should klear up some konfusion and allow one key less on keyboards.

There will be growing publik enthusiasm in the sekond year, when the troublesome "ph" will be replaced with "f", making words like "fotograf" 20% shorter.

In the third year, publik akseptanse of the new spelling kan be expekted to reach the stage where more komplikated changes are possible. Governments will enkourage the removal of double letters which have always ben a deterent to akurate speling. Also, al wil agre that the horible mes of the silent "e" is disgrasful.

By the fourth yer, peopl wil be reseptiv to steps such as replasing "th" with "z" and "w" with "v".

During ze fifz yer, ze unesesary "o" kan be dropd from vords kontaining "ou" and similar changes vud of kors be aplid to ozer kombinations of leters. After zis fifz yer, ve vil hav a reli sensibl riten styl. Zer vil be no mor trubls or difikultis and everivun vil find it ezi to understand ech ozer. ZE DREM VIL FINALI COM TRU!

Re:Zimply yooz Qwerty

[greenfruitsalad]

my native language has alphabet consisting of 46 graphemes. i do fine with our standard qwerty (or more traditional qwertz) keyboard layout. the french alphabet has only 33 graphemes. what a bunch of whiny babies. they should watch my japanese colleague type (in kanji). now THAT is struggle.

as somebody who used to frequently enter touchtyping competitions (in high school), my performance falls by mere 5% when i use the top row of keys too (number row, which in non english languages contains localised characters and requires Shift to write numbers). Using the top row is simply no big deal once you have the muscle memory. In fact, the biggest weakness of non-en layouts is the employment of right pinky. There are just too many keys for that little sucker. if i'd change anything, i'd probably stick a column of keys between t-y, g-h, v-b and b-n to ease up on the use of pinky. that would also curve the keyboard nicely.

Re: Zimply yooz Qwerty

[Anonymous Coward]

qwerty is just as badly designed as azerty was, except computer people repurposed useless badly placed qwerty symbols such as @ | [] in computer languages over time, without consideration for other layouts where they didn't exist (since they *were* useless in human languages), and now pretend it is all brilliant US design (it was not)

Re: Zimply yooz Qwerty

[Anonymous Coward]

There is no myth. Qwerty slowed down hunt and peck typists who knew the alphabet. By the time key jamming was solved it was faster for typists than the alternative.
I still think there is some other random distribution which would actually be better.

Re: Zimply yooz Qwerty

[Anonymous Coward]

So basically we change to German?

Re: Zimply yooz Qwerty

[ChunderDownunder]

Her Majesty's Government conceded that English spelling had room for improvement and has therefore accepted a five-year phasing in of "Euro-English".

Nice try but I don't think the Queen gets a say with Brexit on the cards, which would leave only Ireland and Malta as member states with the tongue as a (co-)official language.

Re: Zimply yooz Qwerty

[AthanasiusKircher]

The whole point of "erty" keyboards is to slow down the typists and reduce key-jams. It's an intentionally bad standard which has lived beyond its meaningfulness for more than 30 years now (when was the last manual typewriter made?)

That's a myth: http://www.straightdope.com/co...

Well, it's partly a myth. Yes, it is a myth that QWERTY was intended to slow down typists. It *WAS* intended to reduce key-jams on manual typewriters, and it did this by introducing frequent alternation between hands and by placing frequently used letters far apart. The frequent alternation between hands actually speeds up typing, so that's a positive for QWERTY, but the placement of frequently used letters far apart is no longer necessary -- and it was never optimized for modern computers and speed/ergonomics.

Basically, the Dvorak proponents often overstate their case, and your link is correct that some of the studies promoted by Dvorak himself had questionable methodology. The supposed benefits of 20-40% increase in speed and getting up to previous QWERTY speed with only 20-25 hours of training is bogus and was known to be bogus for the past 50 years or more.

On the other hand, various studies do show Dvorak has some advantage over QWERTY, both theoretically (in terms of motion needed to travel by the hands, etc.) and practically, but that advantage is likely more in the 5-10% speed increase range and it likely requires about 100 hours of retraining to get back to QWERTY speed for an existing touch-typist. That's just a lot of work for a small benefit, especially when one can use that 100 hours instead to train in specific ways and increase QWERTY speed instead -- which likely will result in a small speed increase as well.

So, GP is correct that QWERTY was designed to reduce manual jams that can no longer happen, and it IS a bad standard for modern computers, etc. But the improvements for moving to a better layout are quite small and would require extensive retraining... so we all tend to stick with a (slightly) inferior standard.

(How "inferior" is really difficult to know precisely, because to my knowledge the "gold standard" study has never been done. There are quite a few studies which have taken QWERTY typists and retrained them in Dvorak. And there are studies that waited until those retrained typists got up to their previous QWERTY speeds and then pitted them (now Dvorak typists) against existing QWERTY typists. But I've never seen reference to a study that took existing Dvorak typists who have been using that layout for years and retrained them in QWERTY -- probably because such people are incredibly rare, and likely next-to-impossible to find in the modern era of ubiquitous keyboards. 25 years ago we could have done a study like this, since many people wouldn't learn to type until high school or later, but now it may be next-to-impossible to even start training someone who has never spent significant time with a QWERTY keyboard first. And that previous QWERTY exposure will significantly affect "muscle memory" and cognitive load when confronted with a new standard, even after many hours of retraining.)

Re: Zimply yooz Qwerty

[PostPhil]

NOPE. Your own link contradicts your statement. The fact that QWERTY was designed to reduce jams is NOT a myth. Reading your own linked article, the actual myth was the claim that Dvorak was demonstrated as better than QWERTY. The evidence that Dvorak is superior is weak at best.

Re: Zimply yooz Qwerty

[angel'o'sphere]

Perhaps you, and the moronic mod who modded you, should for funky sake, read the li you post?
How can you call it a myth, and give as link which you think proves the myth, when the link clearly supports your parent?
The 'anti jamming' design of QWERTY is not a myth, but a fact.

Re: Zimply yooz Qwerty

[hucker75]

The best would be alphabetical order. This has been proved somewhere. The "exposed myth" article only talks about Dvorak, not alphabetical.

Re:Zimply yooz Qwerty

[Anonymous Coward]

More evidence that French is stupider than English.

Re: Zimply yooz Qwerty

[Anonymous Cow Ward]

(3) at least one study indicates that placing commonly used keys far apart, as with the QWERTY, actually speeds typing, since you frequently alternate hands; and (4) the QWERTY keyboard did not become a standard overnight but beat out several competing keyboards over a period of years.

Yes, it was intended to prevent jams, but by moving frequently used letters far apart for mechanical reasons. Using alternating hands speeds typing. It wasn't intended to slow down typists, but move keys around so mechanical jams were less frequent.

Re: Zimply yooz Qwerty

[MTBaldwin]

Still have my IBM Selectric II. Still use for legal docs...

Re: Zimply yooz Qwerty

[Anonymous Coward]

Not quite... It was a combination of placing letters usually used together at opposite ends, not to slow typists but to avoid clashing of the hammers.

Re: Zimply yooz Qwerty

[niftymitch]

The whole point of "erty" keyboards is to slow down the typists and reduce key-jams. It's an intentionally bad standard which has lived beyond its meaningfulness for more than 30 years now (when was the last manual typewriter made?)

And it is not an interesting comparison even if the key-jam issue
was an issue.

Keyboards are simple programmable devices, TODAY.
Standards from the mechanical device days need not apply.

Keyboard maps and closure handlers are software that is
just too easy to play with in the system and as such can just be
fixed.

Any TLA will not tell you (but could) that keystroke logging, interception
and even modification is so darn easy that this is simply possible.
If Logitech in French speaking parts of Switzerland wanted to a make
a French keyboard and there was a market they would have already.

Those that worry about such things should design an improved model
open source or license for pennies the "standard" and get-r-done.

Quit the noise.. make an improved solution and a market.

Re: Zimply yooz Qwerty

[niftymitch]

Still have my IBM Selectric II. Still use for legal docs...

The Selectric is an astounding keyboard.
If the darn things were not so expensive (and heavy) I would still have one.

Re: Zimply yooz Qwerty

[JoeMerchant]

It's not as simple as building a better mousetrap. The problem is all the worse mousetraps all over the world that you'll have to deal with when your "special flower" isn't available.

I went through this with Autocad 14 - very customizable interface, I customized it, worked in my customized interface for about 200 hours and was a good 20% faster than I would have been using the standard setup. Then I went to a machine shop and tried to work with one of the tech's Autocad workstations there and I was about 80% slower than I would have been had I spent those 200 hours learning the standard setup.

Re: Zimply yooz Qwerty

[niftymitch]

It's not as simple as building a better mousetrap. The problem is all the worse mousetraps all over the world that you'll have to deal with when your "special flower" isn't available.

I went through this with Autocad 14 - very customizable interface, I customized it, worked in my customized interface for about 200 hours and was a good 20% faster than I would have been using the standard setup. Then I went to a machine shop and tried to work with one of the tech's Autocad workstations there and I was about 80% slower than I would have been had I spent those 200 hours learning the standard setup.

Spot on.
A worthy keyboard that you carry with you is perhaps another mousetrap.
With USB and Bluetooth some improvements should be easy.
Setup files like Autocad should be easy to isolate. Something like " . MyPersonalAutocad"
so not sticky but personal.

With influenza and ebola it makes sense to have personal keyboard+mouse at
any shared keyboard office. Such a keyboard can also address aspects of authentication and
identification in many contexts if so designed.

Your spot on reply makes the point that this is darn silly at many levels.
But technology can fill a need.

Keyboard makers take note...

Re: Zimply yooz Qwerty

[RyoShin]

That's just a lot of work for a small benefit, especially when one can use that 100 hours instead to train in specific ways and increase QWERTY speed instead -- which likely will result in a small speed increase as well.

There's also the problem of portability: Even if you are faster on your own Dvorak keyboard, 99% of the English-speaking world has QWERTY. The second you have to sit down at someone else's computer to type anything, you're back to hunt-and-peck for at least a short bit until the QWERTY muscle memory kicks in (and then you'll repeat the process when you return to your own keyboard.)

It's like trying to use British-style outlets in America; you can, and maybe there's even a valid reason to do so, but whatever help it gives you is lost due to the incompatibility with other places...

X11 compose key

[Anonymous Coward]

'Nuff said. (C'est tout.)

Re:X11 compose key

[Z00L00K]

Well, most European keyboards have the "dead" keys containing the accents like and `, so you push and then e to get é.

I'm not sure why they actually complain about the € character - it's not often used except when you write about money and it's only a few persons compared to the vast number of users that suffers there. For some reason I have the character instead of the $ on shift+4 - a character that I never use and I don't know who's using it.

Those that have set the keyboard standards seems to have ignored completely which characters that are most used by computer users.

Also realize that the QWERTY and AZERTY layouts are intentionally made to slow down typing - this because the early typewriters otherwise got a hammer jam.

Re:X11 compose key

[Anonymous Coward]

The person who raised the problem was a minister; obviously government employees have to use the euro sign many times, and people doing business (which are lots of people in a country) as well. The problem with the sign is that sometimes it's on the 0, sometimes on the E, you say you have it on the 4, and I've seen it on the 5 as well. The variability is irritating and that's the reason why we need a standard.

The current French keyboard does not have dead key for é accent. In French the  is used only on é, so there is no real purpose for a dead key. There is a separate key for é, but é gives you the number 2 (even in caps lock), so you can't easily get à (at least for Windows users -- X11 under linux includes easy ways to get uppercase accented letters but you guess the minister is not using that). Also the é accented letter is very frequent, which makes it annoying if you get it from a dead key (dégénéré fédéré récréé hétérogénéité). There is opportunity to rethink the standard, maybe add a dead key, maybe keep the separate key but think of an easy way to get the uppercase. Nothing is decided, the announcement just says we need to do something about it.

Re:X11 compose key

[Guybrush_T]

Agreed. I've been typing french with a qwerty keyboard for 15 years and it is actually better to type french than an azerty keyboard when you use the Compose key.

It's actually way more regular : on an azerty keyboard, typing an é is one stroke, but typing an ê is 3 (and a completely different logic).

Compose, on the other hand, is like magic, and getting an € is as simple as merging an E with a = (completely logical !). Plus you can write german ß, or other european characters such as ø, ñ, ... with a simple and intuitive method.

Too bad not many people know about this, and that windows "international qwerty" mode is not using a Compose key either.

Re: X11 compose key

[Anonymous Coward]

Stop believing everything you read on the Internet.

The more you tighten your grip...

[Anonymous Coward]

...the more star systems will slip through your fingers.

When you have centralised institutes to legislate your language and culture, you end up polarising and encouraging ghettoisation.

If Europe wants to not end up like France, it can at worst take the approach of mostly passive tolerance traditional in the UK (New Labour and Cameron have fucked things up a bit) - allow stuff to evolve organically but bring down the full force of the law where needed - or at best the Finnish approach of educating people on local culture to prevent abuses, but otherwise leaving people alone.

The French, OTOH, worry about location of keyboard characters while Paris burns.

Re:The more you tighten your grip...

[bedonnant]

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.

Re:The more you tighten your grip...

[Anonymous Coward]

I was hoping they would take not being able to type their language on any keyboard as a hint that they should finally revise the language ... Bon, let's see where this exercise in futility will take them :)

Re:The more you tighten your grip...

[Anonymous Coward]

The point is that you are fiddling about a keyboard while the sand niggers and Koran thumpers are invading Europe.

Re:The more you tighten your grip...

[ze_foster]

So what did they do for the first 16 years of the 21st century that prevented them from solving this problem?

Re:The more you tighten your grip...

[bedonnant]

Revising a language because of a keyboard layout sounds much more of an exercise in futility than just switching to a better layout.

Re:The more you tighten your grip...

[bedonnant]

It's actually something that pops up every few decades. Each time without effect, because everyone is used to make do with AZERTY. There already are French-optimized layouts of course (dvorak-fr, bepo, etc), but they are not standardized and are sadly probably too different to get any kind of traction.

Re:The more you tighten your grip...

[BarbaraHudson]

Revising the language because accented characters are a PITA even for the french is a damned fine idea.

Often, an accent is the only distinguishing factor between two similarly spelled words.

Funny how other languages seem to do okay without accents. Think, for example, about "to READ a book" as opposed to "having READ a book." We don't need phonetic accents to distinguish the two.

Drop the accents already - they're a hangover from the past.

Re:The more you tighten your grip...

[Grishnakh]

I don't see the problem here at all. It's not like someone else picked their keyboard for them: they chose it themselves!!! AFAIK, they're the only ones using AZERTY, so it's obviously something they came up with by themselves, so if it's not serving them well, then it's their own dumb fault. How long did it take them to figure this out? Over a century I'm guessing. If they were just using the keyboards we English-speakers use, they'd be using QWERTY. Since they obviously took the time to make their own layout, they should have done a much better job of it.

Re:The more you tighten your grip...

[bedonnant]

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?

Re:The more you tighten your grip...

[Grishnakh]

They *did* switch to a different layout: the AZERTY one. Why'd they do that if it doesn't work for them? And why are they only now complaining about it? It's not like typewriters are a new thing in France.

Re:The more you tighten your grip...

[ColdWetDog]

You looser ....

Re:The more you tighten your grip...

[BarbaraHudson]

1. We're talking about french here.
2. Other languages can also stand modernization. As my example demonstrates, "I READ a book yesterday" and I will READ a book tomorrow" fix the situation you describe. Just transliterate those sounds, already, to match existing characters. English did it long ago.

Re:The more you tighten your grip...

[meerling]

Unless you're talking about kanji, which is a freaking nightmare. If a kanji keyboard actually had all the kanji characters you'd need it would take a multifloor building just to hold the keyboard.

Re:The more you tighten your grip...

[meerling]

English spelling is also atrocious. It works much better with a true phonetic alphabet.

Re:The more you tighten your grip...

[meerling]

Ah Ha!
Very punny. ;)

Re:The more you tighten your grip...

[Anonymous Coward]

What phonemes? With English being a mishmash of other languages it has most of the word sounds from most European languages. And that is especially true for French.

Re:The more you tighten your grip...

[Anonymous Coward]

Hey, we have custom keyboard layout here in the Nordic countries as well, so why not allow the French to have their lovely keyboards!? Integration policy, that what it was during the colonial times. Perhaps the French are too shameful of expressing their culture in their own country today, which would be funny because any non-refugee immigrant should come to France for the French culture, not for their own which they willingly left behind.

Re:The more you tighten your grip...

[Anonymous Coward]

Considering how much of English is trying to badly mimic French it is a bit worrying that English speakers aren't more worried about not being able to type a lot of words they use correctly.

Re:The more you tighten your grip...

[TapeCutter]

Complaining about the inconsistency of the location of certain keys across keyboards started when typewriters were invented and hasn't stopped, I have the same complaint about my English desktop vs my English laptop. I have to press two keys on my laptop for "home", my desktop has a single home key. Like most developers a lot of my work is copy-paste-edit, inconsistency in the placement and shift status of the home/pgup/pgdn keys is a pain in the arse.

I don't really care about French keyboards. I do have to work on Japanese servers at times, but I do not read/write/speak Japanese. To do that I need another English PC beside me so I can compare the locations of menu items in the GUI. Oddly enough a Japanese dos box usually works in English, the Japanese logs are often in English too. The software I help develop ( for a Japanese multi-national) is the same, everything under the hood is in English, our Japanese masters just provide Japanese translations of English resource strings for the front end. To make things just that bit more confusing, the bulk of the coding is done by Russian sub-contractors working in Moscow. The Russians we deal with are all bilingual and very fluent in written English, with a few exception the Japanese and Aussies are all mono-lingual.

Re: The more you tighten your grip...

[bestweasel]

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.

Re: The more you tighten your grip...

[Anonymous Coward]

AllÃh rÃléÅY ok?

Re:The more you tighten your grip...

[GuB-42]

There are plenty of keyboard layouts that can be used to type French correctly, like the one that is used in Canada. If you want to be more exotic, there is the bepo layout, which is the French equivalent to the Dvorak layout.
And while French could benefit from some revision to fix the many irregularities of the language, it won't make it easier to type on an AZERTY keyboard unless we add even more irregularities or turn French into another language entirely.

Re:The more you tighten your grip...

[bedonnant]

If you consider the close example "I READ it", you don't know if it's present or past tense. That's a loss of information. Anyway, the point is moot, no one in France is seriously pushing for changing the language. People even want to keep their local idioms, although they're slowly dying out.

Re:The more you tighten your grip...

[BarbaraHudson]

English spelling is also atrocious. It works much better with a true phonetic alphabet.

Tell me abut it - like the pretentious SOBs who mis-pronounce the sch schedule as sh instead of sk in a vain attempt to sound more cultured. They get mad when I point out that school is pronouned sk.

Re:The more you tighten your grip...

[Anonymous Coward]

Stop being a racist. You need to respect the Qu'ran, and that means wearing a burqa if you're female. If you don't follow Islamic modesty codes, then you're being a racist.

Re:The more you tighten your grip...

[BarbaraHudson]

"I READ a book today" is past tense. No loss of information. Also, written french has changed - it was just over 200 years ago that they added the circumflex, so obviously dropping it again would be no big loss.

Re:The more you tighten your grip...

[ClickOnThis]

There are plenty of inconsistent pronunciations in English. I wouldn't rag on people who pronounce schedule with a "sh" sound.

Consider the following famous poem, possibly anonymous, but also possibly excerpted from The Chaos by Gerard Nolst Trenité.

English is tough stuff

Dearest creature in creation,
Study English pronunciation.
I will teach you in my verse
Sounds like corpse, corps, horse, and worse.
I will keep you, Suzy, busy,
Make your head with heat grow dizzy.
Tear in eye, your dress will tear.
So shall I! Oh hear my prayer.

Just compare heart, beard, and heard,
Dies and diet, lord and word,
Sword and sward, retain and Britain.
(Mind the latter, how it's written.)
Now I surely will not plague you
With such words as plaque and ague.
But be careful how you speak:
Say break and steak, but bleak and streak;
Cloven, oven, how and low,
Script, receipt, show, poem, and toe.

Hear me say, devoid of trickery,
Daughter, laughter, and Terpsichore,
Typhoid, measles, topsails, aisles,
Exiles, similes, and reviles;
Scholar, vicar, and cigar,
Solar, mica, war and far;
One, anemone, Balmoral,
Kitchen, lichen, laundry, laurel;
Gertrude, German, wind and mind,
Scene, Melpomene, mankind.

Billet does not rhyme with ballet,
Bouquet, wallet, mallet, chalet.
Blood and flood are not like food,
Nor is mould like should and would.
Viscous, viscount, load and broad,
Toward, to forward, to reward.
And your pronunciation's OK
When you correctly say croquet,
Rounded, wounded, grieve and sieve,
Friend and fiend, alive and live.

Ivy, privy, famous; clamour
And enamour rhyme with hammer.
River, rival, tomb, bomb, comb,
Doll and roll and some and home.
Stranger does not rhyme with anger,
Neither does devour with clangour.
Souls but foul, haunt but aunt,
Font, front, wont, want, grand, and grant,
Shoes, goes, does. Now first say finger,
And then singer, ginger, linger,
Real, zeal, mauve, gauze, gouge and gauge,
Marriage, foliage, mirage, and age.

Query does not rhyme with very,
Nor does fury sound like bury.
Dost, lost, post and doth, cloth, loth.
Job, nob, bosom, transom, oath.
Though the differences seem little,
We say actual but victual.
Refer does not rhyme with deafer.
Foeffer does, and zephyr, heifer.
Mint, pint, senate and sedate;
Dull, bull, and George ate late.
Scenic, Arabic, Pacific,
Science, conscience, scientific.

[...]

The above is an excerpt. (Slashdot won't let me post the whole thing because the lines are too short.) Go here to see the entire poem.

Re:The more you tighten your grip...

[ClickOnThis]

Revising the language because accented characters are a PITA even for the french is a damned fine idea.

[...]

Drop the accents already - they're a hangover from the past.

Sorry Barbara. I have read many of your posts and respect your opinion. But I have to disagree with you on this one.

Removing accents from a language robs it of expressive power. Many words used in English have been borrowed from other languages, and robbed of their accents, have lost much of their flavour in the transition.

Consider naive, compared to naïve. Look at what is lost, from the omission of a simple umlaut.

Or expose, compared to exposé. Or lame, compared to lamé.

It's time we considered the lack of an accent as a spelling mistake, not an act of expediency.

Re:The more you tighten your grip...

[mysidia]

I think the GP needs to just cut to the chase, for goodness sake, drop this façade, have a saké, relax to some animé , and then complete their exposé, with the suggestion the des gens qui parlent français people start typing all their written communiqés in English which conveniently disposes of the accented letters problem.

Since of course, no words used in the US have diacritic marks on them, ever

Re:The more you tighten your grip...

[mysidia]

"I READ a book today" is past tense. No loss of information.

No; now, which word you are using when you typed "read" has become ambiguous, and you have to start making a subjective interpretation of the rest of the sentence to infer which word would have been used.

Imagine you see two words I READ, and the rest of the sentence is covered up. Now try to tell me the phonetics of the lexeme "Read".

Re: The more you tighten your grip...

[mysidia]

I suggest using CAPS LOCK for the typing of all-caps sentences with accented bits.

Re:The more you tighten your grip...

[mysidia]

For Kanji; I suggest shipping a keyboard that comes with a 50 pound book with a list of multi-key compositions for selecting a desired Kanji unit.

Or just ship with a handwriting recognition unit instead of kanji, where the user draws the symbol.

Re:The more you tighten your grip...

[Anonymous Coward]

That particular word is a UK/US split. It's arbitrary.

Re:The more you tighten your grip...

[demonlapin]

There aren't even enough letters to describe the phonemes present in English, and English orthography doesn't always follow current pronunciation.

From what little I know of the subject, the writing systems that really excite linguists are syllabaries. Both Hangul (for Korean) and Sequoyah's Cherokee syllabary are widely admired for their elegance, although you have to have the right kind of language to have a syllabary. English would not do well with one.

Re:The more you tighten your grip...

[reboot246]

Every word you spelled with a diacritic mark could have been spelled, and easily understood, without them. They simply aren't needed in a modern language.

Re: The more you tighten your grip...

[HTH NE1]

Or maybe their government could⦠stop creating problems for itself to solve and cease insisting that proper names of people and businessess be in ALL CAPS IN LEGAL AND GOVERNMENT DOCUMENTS! Maybe consider bold print? It's the 21st Century; we have rich text formats available.

Re: The more you tighten your grip...

[HTH NE1]

"Or maybe their government couldæ"

Really? Slashdot still doesn't support Unicode?

Re:The more you tighten your grip...

[Blaskowicz]

The circumflex is a modifier key on AZERTY, that makes it reasonably easy to type.

Re:The more you tighten your grip...

[Anonymous Coward]

No one uses that formulation in actual English. For present tense you would say, "I am reading" not "I read".

Re:The more you tighten your grip...

[PCM2]

My PCs all have US English keyboards.

To type accented letters, in Windows I hit Start+Spacebar to toggle back and forth from the English International keyboard layout. (It ships with Windows, but you do need to install it and possibly activate the hotkey.)

The English International layout allows you to type most European accents with easy to remember mnemonics, like typing double quotes plus a vowel to put an umlaut over the vowel, or typing a single quote plus a C to put a cedilla under the C.

I know OS X has keyboard shortcuts for most of the accented characters, too, and surely there must be an easy way to achieve similar results on Linux, so I'm not sure what the problem really is.

Maybe what's needed isn't a new keyboard, but simply more education?

Re:The more you tighten your grip...

[shutdown -p now]

It depends on which kind of present tense (i.e. which meaning you're trying to convey). English has more than one.

Re:The more you tighten your grip...

[shutdown -p now]

So, when are we removing the accent from "i"?

Re: The more you tighten your grip...

[Samantha Wright]

And "We READ the book" when, exactly? ... Barb, honey, armchair linguistics on the Internet are never a winnable game. I would strongly advise against partaking in them. Digging your faux (pronounced "foh," not "fox") Quebecois French, though.

Re: The more you tighten your grip...

[Dynedain]

I read newspapers daily.

Past tense or present? Without more context such as "while I drink my coffee." or "when I was in grad school." the reader cannot determine context and information is lost when compared to the spoken example where the word "read" is pronounced differently to indicate tense.

Re:The more you tighten your grip...

[Anonymous Coward]

Or expose, compared to exposé. Or lame, compared to lamé. ...or perhaps expous , exposee, laim, lamee.

Accents are band-aids from the goose pen era. Don't for a second think English has anything to do with common sense orthography. Spelling reformations are troublesome because they may sever the bond to old literature. But 1600 graphemes for 60 phonemes is undoubtedly delusional.

French bureaucrats needs something to do, let them waffle.

Re:The more you tighten your grip...

[Z00L00K]

Well, Swedish have three extra wovels - Å, Ä and Ö. And they aren't pronounced the same as without the accents - far from.

And using "OE" instead of "Ö" is creating a completely different meaning and pronunciation in Swedish since we usually pronounce every syllable individually. Just dropping the accent characters is also bad. The word "vänlig" (Friendly) will become "vanlig" (Usual), so the accents are essential to the local languages.

The accents are therefore NOT a hangover from the past. The lack of accents in the English world is what's limiting.

Re:The more you tighten your grip...

[Z00L00K]

Only when you talk about English, in other languages they may change the meaning of a word completely.

Re:The more you tighten your grip...

[Z00L00K]

Well, that's going to be interesting since it's not an accent, but Salvador Dalí has an accented i.

Re: The more you tighten your grip...

[Z00L00K]

All caps is a sure indicator of spam mail.

That's the Government way of trying to hide their activities by blaming your spam filter and ultimately you for not reading their decrees so that they can penalize you.

Re: The more you tighten your grip...

[Z00L00K]

It's only supported for a few characters. Probably to avoid a lot of spam posts in Korean, Russian or Greek.

Re:The more you tighten your grip...

[shutdown -p now]

Yes, good point. But why stop at accents. All diacritics are stupid.

Re:The more you tighten your grip...

[MichaelSmith]

Just look at Bahasa Malaysia.

Re:The more you tighten your grip...

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm French and I can type upper-case accentuated characters with diacritics alright, on Linux that is.

The problem really is with Windows, which don't let one type those characters directly (have to hold AltGr and enter character codes on the keypad), and MS Office, which has stupid correction rules that won't add missing accents and diacritics on upper-case letters (a typography error in French).
Being able to compose accents and diacritics like Linux would be a good solution, as would fixing French correction rules in MS Office.

That doesn't change the fact that AZERTY and QWERTY *both* are shitty layouts in the first place, regardless of accents and diacritics, as those were made to slow down typing and prevent arms of a mechanical typewriter from colliding.

One thing AZERTY really sucks at, however, is writing code as funny key combinations are needed to type brackets and curly braces.

Re:The more you tighten your grip...

[stealth_finger]

. The lack of accents in the English world is what's limiting.

Limiting those that rely on them maybe. It doesn't take a great amount of mental dexterity to figure what word is meant, even when they are spelled exactly the same.

Re: The more you tighten your grip...

[stealth_finger]

"Or maybe their government couldæ"

Really? Slashdot still doesn't support Unicode?

You sure you don't just need a new keyboard?

Re: The more you tighten your grip...

[Anonymous Coward]

The sentence "I READ the New York Times." Could be past or present.

Past: I read yesterday's issue.
Present: I keep up with daily publications.

Re:The more you tighten your grip...

[sociocapitalist]

Brilliant :-)

Re: The more you tighten your grip...

[Anonymous Coward]

What everyone really needs is some IME for their language.
Then everything can be typed with a standard US qwerty keyboard(or any other keyboard for that matter) with little effort.
Even combining keys are retarded. You could type ae in many Romanic languages instead of è and only get a one key prompt for the few words that actually need an A and an E together.

Re:The more you tighten your grip...

[Big Hairy Ian]

All old typewriter keyboards were designed specifically to be awkward to use deliberately to slow them down stop people typing too fast for the underlying mechanics. It's time we ditched them en mass in favor of ergonomic keyboards. Judging from all the Who Har the AZERTY keyboard has been tremendously successful for its intended purpose.

Re:The more you tighten your grip...

[Anonymous Coward]

If you had to, you'd just end up with "vänlig" being written as "venlig" - which is not too far in pronunciation and clearly distinguishable.
What you'd lose though is the ability to actually have matching writing and pronunciation, i.e. the situation English is in.
Something that the Swedish wouldn't stand for, considering what you've done to words like fauteuil (fåtölj) and parapluie (paraply) to make them spell kind of like you say it. There might be even more horrible examples.

Re:The more you tighten your grip...

[Anonymous Coward]

So called native English speakers should be compelled to pass any of the English language tests, especially the "barrier" English language tests for the migrants.

> "I READ a book today" is past tense.

WRONG!

I HAVE READ a book today.

Present Perfect.

Re:The more you tighten your grip...

[TuringTest]

Here, hear the pronounciation.

I've found also a phonetical transcription linked from here.

Re:The more you tighten your grip...

[Anonymous Coward]

In addition to French and English, I also understand Dutch and German. The latter three have a far easier solution to phonemes: just use more letters. No European language uses one letter per phoneme anyway, and the French already use e.g. "oei". And with 5 + 25 + 125 possibilities there really is no phoneme that justifies an accent.

Re:The more you tighten your grip...

[godrik]

There are plenty of inconsistent pronunciations in English. I wouldn't rag on people who pronounce schedule with a "sh" sound.

I am pretty sure it is pronounced with a "sh" sound in the UK.

Re:The more you tighten your grip...

[angel'o'sphere]

Certainly not, why should it?

Re:The more you tighten your grip...

[BarbaraHudson]

That's just because with their teeth they can't speak English properly :-)

Re:The more you tighten your grip...

[angel'o'sphere]

The circumflex got added because it indicates the following letter is omitted in writing. E.g. hopital, with a circumflex on the o (can not type that on an iPad) is a 'short form' for hospital. Probably a bad example, as I don't know a French word that had two different meanings depending on a circumflex on the o. However I doubt that the French would agree that getting rid of it is a good idea.
On the other hand, most French can not write French. If you get a five pages letter from a ministry, e.g. for taxes or a building permit or what ever, you easily can expect five to ten spelling errors per page.

A friend of mine, french - more precisely 'Alsacian' -, was half considering to make a martial arts test in France in Aikido for 5th DAN. (Usually you only get tested till 4th DAN, higher ranks are granted as respect if you are participating in the Aikido organization of your country) So, result was only 'public figures' got promoted beyond 4th DAN. So about ten years ago, perhaps 15, the french changed the system, and crafted a special 'test' for the 5th DAN graduation.

The test basically is writing an essay, and then giving a demonstration expressing what you have written in that essay.

So I asked my friend if he wants to go for 5th DAN (he has now something like 40years Aikido background) and he said: "Fuck hell, no! I have to write an essay! I would have spelling error every second sentence, I did not write letters or anything the last 30 years, I never will do that!"

Well, his Aikido students helped him typing it on a Mac and used obviously spelling correction and dictionaries to make it good, so 3 years ago he received 5th DAN at age of 67 or so.

Re:The more you tighten your grip...

[BarbaraHudson]

People have no problem distinguishing between the two uses of expose/exposé, depending on context, no accent requiired. Same with lame/lamé. Same with resume/resumé. Don't need the accent, because it's obvious from the context. "I will resume working on my job resume".

As for naive, the french term naïve has a much broader meaning than the english equivalent, even with the accent, so someone who is not familiar with french won't get it anyway.

Re:The more you tighten your grip...

[angel'o'sphere]

No it would not, how can one be so dumb?

The french don't even understand you if you try to pronounce words without using the proper 'accented pronunciation'. At least they claim so.

Can't be so hard to grasp that an accent looking like this / means the sound goes up, and an accent looking like this \ means the sound goes down (sorry, can only type one of both on an iPad so I choose to use slashes in both cases).

Why the fuck would you even attempt to get rid of such an accent when it is absolutely no problem to transfer from sound to writing at all?

Words like faux, or peut-etre, imagine a accent circumflex on the second e, are probably very far away in their spelling from their pronunciation ... there is much more option to change in such words, but then again, you would move away from the original latin writing in many cases, which leads to other problems.

Unlike english, the french mostly use an 'e' to indicate plural or female gender in writing. And it makes a fucking difference if the letter in front of it is either an e with accent degu or an accent grave. No idea why people who obviously don't speak the language in question write nonsense like you write.

Re:The more you tighten your grip...

[BarbaraHudson]

Except that we get it from the context ... context is everything, and our minds have no problem picking out the right context, because we don't comprehend what we read in a strictly serial sense, one word at a time, in real time. That fraction of a second when you see the next few words lets the brain figure it out before you're even conscious of it.

Re:The more you tighten your grip...

[BarbaraHudson]

But still entirely unnecessary, since it didn't even exist in french until just over 200 years ago.

Re:The more you tighten your grip...

[BarbaraHudson]

Texting will remove the need for all superfluous accents, diacritics, letters, words, etc. It's already happening.

Re:The more you tighten your grip...

[Blaskowicz]

I would say otherwise : Windows has Alt + keypad numbers (not Alt Gr), Linux has not. So you can't just learn the code for the character in question and use it that way.

On Linux, depends on the keyboard layout you chose (french, french legacy, french alternative, french legacy alternative.. wtf are they?)
Easier to ignore capital accental letters, though the most annoying one is capital "ç".

Re:The more you tighten your grip...

[Z00L00K]

Unfortunately in some cases it may actually be a problem, and at worst the change may transfer into an insult.

Re: The more you tighten your grip...

[BarbaraHudson]

It's funny, because we have the Quebec English language, North American English language, and Quebec French ... and every little bit of a while someone from france - not the same at all - makes Quebec French sound like the speaker works in the docks.

Re: The more you tighten your grip...

[Samantha Wright]

Well they're not wrong!

Re:The more you tighten your grip...

[BarbaraHudson]

I've never seen the french equivalent of hospital with an embedded 's', nor heard it pronounced as if there were an 's' in it. Then again, the 'h' is also silent. :-)

Re: The more you tighten your grip...

[Anonymous Coward]

It's time you stopped repeating this ridiculous myth.

Re:The more you tighten your grip...

[Anonymous Coward]

In the UK, that is the correct pronunciation. Nothing pretentious or cultured about it.

Just use whatever the Germans do

[CajunArson]

Look, just take a standard keyboard from Germany, walk down the Champs-Ãlysées with it, and I'm sure the French will surrender to it in a very organized fashion.

Re:Just use whatever the Germans do

[Anonymous Coward]

You're an idiot and most likely failed your history class.

Re:Just use whatever the Germans do

[Locke2005]

Spoken like a true cheese-eating surrender monkey. I fart in your general direction!

Re:Just use whatever the Germans do

[Sable Drakon]

They still wouldn't be able to type in French on it though.

Re:Just use whatever the Germans do

[BarbaraHudson]

Sure you can - alt+130 gives an é, alt+143 screws up your browser, ...

Re:Just use whatever the Germans do

[Sable Drakon]

There's more to French than the é.

Re:Just use whatever the Germans do

[93 Escort Wagon]

I think it might work better if you send the German keyboard by way of Belgium and Luxembourg.

Re:Just use whatever the Germans do

[BarbaraHudson]

I am well aware of that. I like the way Android does it - you hold down the letter, and a bunch of alternate accent characters pop up. Try it.

Re:Just use whatever the Germans do

[PolygamousRanchKid]

They still wouldn't be able to type in French on it though.

The French are not expected to type in French. They are expected to type in German.

At least that was the plan, a while back . . .

Re: Just use whatever the Germans do

[Anonymous Coward]

Hmm, they come out as gibberish on Slashdot.

Re: Just use whatever the Germans do

[BarbaraHudson]

Hmm, they come out as gibberish on Slashdot.

So do most of the articles, and many of the comments :-)

Re:Just use whatever the Germans do

[Anonymous Coward]

Grave accents, acute accents, cedilles. It goes way beyond the simple é you dumbass.

Re:Just use whatever the Germans do

[fnj]

Spoken like a true cheese-eating surrender monkey.

Jackass. Wild guess, but just in case you're USAian (I am), FYI there wouldn't be a USA if France (also Spain and the Netherlands) 240 years ago hadn't intervened in the struggle. Key material and funding and morale support was provided from the beginning. Lafayette arrived in 1777 and stood with Washington through the critical Valley Forge ordeal. In 1778 France entered into an outright alliance.

The USA suffered 6824 battle deaths during the Revolution; the French, 10,000.

France lost 1,150,000 sons in battle in WW1. Together with Russia (1,800,000) they bore the brunt of the fighting. The entire British Empire lost 734,000. The USA? 53,000 - about (but not quite) the same figure as Canada, and almost exactly the same number as Australia.

In one and one half months of fighting in the Battle of France in WW2, the French suffered 360,000 casualties. Compare to 1.1 million military casualties by the US (four times the population of France) in three and one half years of fighting.

Now, terrible blunders were committed during the Battle of France (by Britain as well as France). Together they matched the German forces numerically, with almost twice the artillery and almost 50% more tanks, and they were decisively beaten with tactics, strategy, fighting proficiency, and superior air power. Britain was able to withdraw to an unassailable island. France was not.

But the French Resistance strove bravely and effectively for four years, and the Free French forces withdrawn to Britain fought on.

Re:Just use whatever the Germans do

[RightwingNutjob]

Mebbe they shood chanj ther writn languaj too bee mor funetikali ekspresibl with ther keebordz

Re:Just use whatever the Germans do

[schnell]

The French unquestionably played a decisive role in the American Revolution. It is a very debatable question whether the US would exist today had the French not intervened on the side of the Colonies in the revolution, and it is probably more likely that it would not. So the US owes the Ancien Regime of 250 years ago a great deal. But let's not overstate things.

Jackass. Wild guess, but just in case you're USAian (I am), FYI there wouldn't be a USA if France (also Spain and the Netherlands) 240 years ago hadn't intervened in the struggle.

As mentioned, the French played a potentially decisive role. But they didn't do it because they loved America, they did it because they hated the British and saw them as engaged in their own proto-"Vietnam" and saw it in their own best interests to jump in. Remember that the French, 20 years earlier, had "owned" Canada and still had rights to most of trans-Mississippi North America. So it wasn't exactly altruistic. Spain (which was just in it to recapture Gibraltar) and the Netherlands played almost no functional role, other than a potential Spanish-French invasion of Britain keeping their fleet at home in 1779.

Key material and funding and morale support was provided from the beginning. Lafayette arrived in 1777 and stood with Washington through the critical Valley Forge ordeal. In 1778 France entered into an outright alliance.

100% agreed. It is in fact very likely that France's support of the Colonies in the American Revolution indirectly led to the ouster of the French monarchy in their own forthcoming revolution because of the debt they racked up in supporting the nascent US. So, again, mad props to France.

The USA suffered 6824 battle deaths during the Revolution; the French, 10,000.

Misleading at best, if not outright wrong. If France did indeed incur those deaths, it was in naval combat in the West Indies trying to win or protect territories there, unrelated to the US.

France lost 1,150,000 sons in battle in WW1. Together with Russia (1,800,000) they bore the brunt of the fighting. The entire British Empire lost 734,000. The USA? 53,000 - about (but not quite) the same figure as Canada, and almost exactly the same number as Australia.

No arguments there either, but WWI was a European war. The vast majority of Americans at the time wanted nothing to do with it, and only became involved after the Kaiser's policy of unrestricted submarine warfare (and the revelation of the Zimmermann telegram) more or less forced the US in. The US only participated actively in the last six months of WWI, so of course their deaths were lower. But it is still very arguable that the US economic and materiel support in the war was one of the few key deciding factors in support of the Triple Entente.

In one and one half months of fighting in the Battle of France in WW2, the French suffered 360,000 casualties. Compare to 1.1 million military casualties by the US (four times the population of France) in three and one half years of fighting.

No arguments there either. But it would be absolutely insane to argue that the US's participation in WW2, along with that of the Soviets, was not the deciding factor. France (at least the part that wasn't under the collaborationist Vichy government) suffered mightily during the war. But to suggest that France's contribution was greater than that of the US is just silly.

Long story short, the French are not "cheese eating surrender monkeys." They have a proud tradition of victorious warfare dating at least back to Charlemagne. And they were the unquestioned masters of Europe during the Napoleonic era. But all that is no reason to try to diminish the US record in order to try to prove that the French are bad-asses.

Re:Just use whatever the Germans do

[DNS-and-BIND]

Bravely? Maybe. Effectively? Not really. The French Resistance is full of myths. We today think of the Resistance as being made up of poets, writers, philosophers, and so on, while the truth is the people who actually grabbed guns and killed Germans were the French equivalent to violent rednecks. I mean, their country had legally surrendered and the war was over. Peace, the most desired outcome, was here. And what happens but some freaks want to shoot the occupiers and make the occupiers start shooting back?

You know why the French have such a bad reputation today? Because postwar French foreign policy was basically, "find out what position the Americans are taking, and do the opposite." That's not going to make you popular anywhere except among America-haters.

Re:Just use whatever the Germans do

[Anonymous Coward]

Not to be a party pooper but I'm pretty certain those French from hundreds of years ago are not the same whinging shits we're dealing with today.
 
Nobody in the civilized world cares about silly little hats for their letters.

Re:Just use whatever the Germans do

[Z00L00K]

Not sure why alt+143 (Å) would screw up your browser, mine works fine.

Re:Just use whatever the Germans do

[Anonymous Coward]

Hello,

This is NOT a good solution. Imagine that each time you wanted to type a I in English, you had to press a key and hold it for 1 second and then select a sub-symbol... What would that do to your typing speed?

When typing in LOWERCASE in french on an AZERTY keyboard, there are no issues...
It's UPPERCASE accented characters which are problematic.
In French, e and é are considered a DIFFERENT character, not an accented character.
Therefore Monsieur Métisse has a different name than Monsieur Metisse (and is pronounced differently).
Now, this pauses issues when you work in uppercase as É is NOT accessible on the AZERTY keyboard. In the time of the typewriter, people would manually add an accent over the uppercase E to deal with it.

You might think that this is not a big issue, but combine this with the old rule that on administrative papers, the LAST NAME is always in uppercase (and the first one has a capital first letter but is in lowercase for the rest), and it can play havoc on administrative paperwork.

Now, the article also talks about lesser used @ and € symbols. These (especially the Euro) were added later on on an already full keyboard, so the right alt key (on the right of the space bar), was transformed into a secondary shift key (called Alt Gr(aphic)). Some keys (like the E or the 0, or the ( and )) were endowed with a 3rd 'symbol' (Euro, Arobase, [ and ] in this case) which are accessed using the Alt gr key.
This was not a problem in the past where these symbols were seldom or never used, but nowdays....

On a side note, being a SW developer on an AZERTY keyboard means that a LOT of very common symbols: Tildé, Dièse, {, [, |, \, @, ], }) are on Alt gr...
On a PC, it is not too much of an issue, but on a mac, it is a PITA has they have decided NOT to print the symbols on the key!

Bonne journée!

PS: As I tired to post this message, I got the error:
"Filter error: Please use fewer 'junk' characters."
That makes me feel so good! Thanks US "standards" for not forcing your restricted 26 letter world view on other cultures!

Re:Just use whatever the Germans do

[AmiMoJo]

Britain was able to withdraw to an unassailable island.

Withdraw is a nice way of putting it. We had our arses thrashed and had to run away, tail between our legs. Our flight was only made possible by French forces defending us as we left in whatever boats we could gather, leaving behind a great deal of equipment in Normandy. It was a total disaster and our army was basically beaten.

If the Germans hadn't screwed up their air campaign during the Battle of Britain we would have lost that way. We came pretty close to being forced to surrender ourselves.

Re:Just use whatever the Germans do

[stealth_finger]

Question: How many Frenchmen does it take to defend Paris from invasion?

Answer: I don't know.

Response: Ne neither, it's never been tried.

Re:Just use whatever the Germans do

[Anonymous Coward]

"The French are not expected to type in French. They are expected to type in German.": France (Frankreich) was created by a mix of German tribes ruling Celts civilised by the Romans. Have a look to this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_Civil_War and maybe you will understand something.

Compare Germany and France in 1940, it's like US sitting with a 400 millions habitants Mexico having the German industry. How long would US survive ?

When you see how the US are still crying about Vietnam War and their 200.000 casualties (When the Vietnamese had ten times more victims and the same proportion of dignity), I am not sure that your average soldier is that courageous. We will see when they will have to fight an enemy of their size, invading their territory, weapons being equal. Killing civilians with drones is something different than courage, of course..

Re: Just use whatever the Germans do

[Anonymous Coward]

And yet Soylent News, also built on slashcode, supports it. Huh. How weird. Oh, that's right, they got that feature working in a few months, while nobody here at the green site wants to take the time to port their changes back or fix it themselves.

Re:Just use whatever the Germans do

[ChunderDownunder]

Champs-ÃflysÃf©es

Your français/Deutsch keyboard mapping seems broken. :)

Re:Just use whatever the Germans do

[Anonymous Coward]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

you asshole

Re:Just use whatever the Germans do

[Anonymous Coward]

Long story short in history, the French were bad-asses, in more recent history (since 1930) not so much.

This typewriter thing seems a minor issue. A more major one might be the recent surrender of your culture to invaders with other ideas.

Re:Just use whatever the Germans do

[mattventura]

European keyboard layouts are overall a mess. I'd imagine French isn't the only layout with such problems. Not to mention the ISO-style left shift and enter keys are less efficient than their ANSI counterparts. If they could make international layouts based on ANSI, it would speed up typing a bit, plus reduce manufacturing costs because PC/keyboard manufacturers wouldn't have to design and build two different layouts. They could just print whatever symbols they need on the keys and be done with it.

Re:Just use whatever the Germans do

[Eloking]

If you wanted to bring example of great France war story to counter-attack about prank about the white flag, why did you skip Napoleon?

An absolutely annihilated 6 of the 7 coalition again France. That's similar, but not comparable to, six WWII won in a span of 20 years. It is no small feat. And, toward the end of the Napoleonic Wars, there was an order in the coalition to not engage and retreat if they meet an army that Napoleon lead.

Most history enthusiast today only remember his major flaw in the invasion of Russia, but putting that aside, he could be considered the greatest military mind of history.

Re:Just use whatever the Germans do

[angel'o'sphere]

Actually you just type the accent first and then the letter you want to have the accent on. I'm pretty sure windows supports this since win95, but I use a Mac and could be wrong, so do most french btw.
However, the accented letters you get with your alt trick are slightly differently coded, yours e.g. gets through the /. unicode hell, and this one: é likely not, lets see ;)

Re:Just use whatever the Germans do

[angel'o'sphere]

Stalingrad was long after Paris.
Do you know what was left from Stalingrad after the german armies got defeated there? Likely not ...

People who make 'french surrender jokes' are stupid, they don't know anything about what actually happened: so good luck in your career, I hope you are less idiotic in your job.

People who mean it serious, which is half of the /. crowed mentioning random french surrender jokes/comments: are moronic idiots.

If you have an enemy at the gates who is prepared to destroy the whole city, killing as many civilians as it needs to get the city and you have no forces in range to protect the city, you have two options:
A) surrender right now, leave the city in tact and no civilian losses
B) fight, get the city destroyed, 100,000s dead civilians in a matter of three or four weeks, and: surrender then

Some nations would go for B) ... I for my part enjoy my regular visits to Paris, a city that is still intact. Ever visited germany? You still see the damage the war caused, especially in the east.

The European union as it exists right now would never have happened so fast and in the way we have it now if the Germans would have been allowed to butcher the French population just for 'honours' sake. The Frensh had never forgiven us after the war if we had destroyed their majour cities.

Funny that we germans now have a word for the wise thing the french did _not_ in Paris, but the germans did in Stalingrad: "Kadavergehorsam", google it. Combined word made of 'Kadaver' and 'Gehorsam'.

France has more war heroes than Germany, that is for sure, namely the Resistance fighters. I would bet the Frensh Resistance killed more German officers than the USA Army.

Re:Just use whatever the Germans do

[Milharis]

While I agree with the rest of your post, I think you downplay a bit the support the US had among the French general population and the cultivated elites. Many in France saw the American revolution and its ideals as the logical consequence of the ideas that spread during the Enlightenment period. You just have to look at the "Declaration des droits de l'homme et du citoyen" to see it's pretty much a copy/paste of the American constitution.
A non-negligible numbers of French aristocrats went to serve as officers or engineers in the US army (among others Lafayette despite the a king's decree preventing French officers to serve in the US army), positions which were sorely lacking. Many others were turned down because they did not have any valuable skills or did not speak English. (Villanueva, The French Contribution) That was when it took 2 months and considerable money to cross the Atlantic.

It's certainly not the main reason why the French's king allied with the US, but I do think it played a role in the level of support the French provided.

Re:Just use whatever the Germans do

[Anonymous Coward]

Have you ever tried programming on one. Too much pain to use { } and even @

ALT-GR, who needs stinking ALT-GR.

Use an english keyboard and then download my Addon Zombie Keys for localisation.

Re:Just use whatever the Germans do

[BarbaraHudson]

It's a GREAT solution for a mobile phone. For a keyboard, just press one key, press and release another, and release the first key. No big deal. You could even have a status line to show you what each second keypress would give.

Re: Just use whatever the Germans do

[Anonymous Coward]

Sounds to me like the French need to learn how to duck.

Re:Just use whatever the Germans do

[houghi]

The thing is that ALL parties involved were most likely decisive. Be it the French, Polish, American, Canadian or whomever at whatever war.

That goes for all sides in all wars for all allies.

Re:Just use whatever the Germans do

[Anonymous Coward]

> It's a GREAT solution for a mobile phone. For a keyboard, just press one key, press and release another, and release the first key. No big deal. You could even have a status line to show you what each second keypress would give.

Barbara. I take you use English on a daily basis. For such language, which rarely uses diacritics, that may a practical solution.

In phones, due to their ludicrously small size, a lot of compromises must be made to be able to view documents, edit them and even to type. Personally, perhaps owing to a certain age I attained, I never ever was able to type effectively on a smartphone and I'm waiting for the laser-projected virtual keyboards to start being able to use well a smart phone.

Besides all that, some languages use accents VERY often. Like two or three per short phrase. That press, hold, choose, press or slide and release cycle you point out is a reason why smart phone keyboards are unusable rather than a practical solution.

Even the PC keyboard as it is could see a lot of improvements not just to efficiently input the French language but a lot of others. It's a shame the typewriter was developed in English-speaking countries, for it never attained a reasonably good working.

Also, for those who think English is better for not having such signs, know that we don't sweat when writing such symbols by hand or reading them in any kind of font. It's just that technology simply has not caught up with our traditional ways.

I use Roman characters myself, but for all the talk about languages like Chinese, though they require a lot of learning, that may be worth if communication is sped up in the following decades after some years of training. That may be why the Japanese still use them, though they have simpler alphabets with fewer (about 50) symbols.

Re:Just use whatever the Germans do

[BarbaraHudson]

There are a lot of accents in french, and it's not that much harder to select both the letter and the diacritic with one motion, so "works for me" on a smartphone (though it took me ages of poking around to find that feature - it's not like they advertise it or anything). And it's great when you're in bed and no other keyboard makes sense.

Mind you, we can all just "speak our minds" and the phone will enter the text itself, so I guess in one way technology has provided the ultimate solution. And then you can have the text translated into the language of the recipient and spoken to them as well. Amazing times. Not the universal communicator of star trek or the babelfish of the Guide, but getting there :-)

I suspect within a couple of decades the great majority simply won't use a keyboard.

Re:Just use whatever the Germans do

[Anonymous Coward]

> There are a lot of accents in french, and it's not that much harder to select both the letter and the diacritic with one motion, so "works for me" on a smartphone (though it took me ages of poking around to find that feature - it's not like they advertise it or anything).

I mistook you for an Anglophone; in my case, I think the problem is the decision stage. If I decide to write "é", it's a done deal in writing. Not so much in a normal keyboard: I must plan ahead and type [] and then [e]. On smart phones there's a constant decision process when I press "e", some six options are offered and I still wasn't able to develop a mechanical/procedural memory of where they are.

Maybe it's a matter of practice.

> Mind you, we can all just "speak our minds" and the phone will enter the text itself, so I guess in one way technology has provided the ultimate solution.

Indeed. Let's hope we can perfect that input method ASAP.

Re:Just use whatever the Germans do

[BarbaraHudson]

I am English, but growing up in Quebec, where they've passed so many laws to make English disappear in public and business, Besides, it's kind of ignorant not to learn the language of your neighbors but expect them to learn yours when you're a minority ... at least that's the way I see it.

Besides, knowing more than one language helps offset dementia, and it's "convenient" when people assume you can't understand them and tell others how they really feel about you right in front of you :-)

ask ed snowden your questions continues...

[Anonymous Coward]

what do you think about the POT (Personal Open Terminal) craze ed? like cb with pictures?

QWERTZ auch

[astro]

The same problem with inconsistently placed and difficult to reach symbols exists with the German QWERTZ keyboards also. I switched to one when I moved here from USA because the everyday need for ö, ä, ü and ß outweighed the difficulties, but it has taken me ages to get used to coding on it.

Re:QWERTZ auch

[fazig]

I don't think that you could call it the same problem.
Sure, the layout is really bad for coding, because of the impractical placement of the bracket symbols. But for writing in the common German or the English language, the layout is rather efficient.

Re:QWERTZ auch

[Anonymous Coward]

Yup.
I am German, and having to deal with {[]} on AltGr-7890, / on Shift-7 and \ on AltGr-(key right of 0) on QWERTZ is pretty painful when you're coding in a language that likes braces and square brackets, and having both *nix and win path seps on shift or altgr combos makes just entering paths get old quick.
As a result switched to US QWERTY well over a decade ago, for casual text ae/oe/ue/ss work fine, and compose (finally that right windows key is useful for something!) is easy enough if I really need a Ä/Ö/Ü/ß.

Re:QWERTZ auch

[markus]

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.

Re:QWERTZ auch

[cold fjord]

Have you ever tried key reassignment or macros?

Re:QWERTZ auch

[Anonymous Coward]

....having both *nix and win path seps on shift or altgr combos makes just entering paths get old quick.

I hope you're not one of those people who write this kind of crappy C (or C++):
#ifdef WIN
char *path = "\\some\path\\to\\file.config";
#else
char *path = "/some/path/to/file.config";
#endif

Re:QWERTZ auch

[Hognoxious]

I occasionally have to type in French, but I can't stand using AZERTY.

Setting an English keyboard to Welsh/UK extended allows you to enter them with combinations of Alt-Gr and dead keys. Before I accidentally discovered this, I had to faff around with charmap.

Re:QWERTZ auch

[TeknoHog]

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.

It's the same issue in Finland, coding on our native layout is excruciating. Fortunately, there are simple ways to change the layout on the fly, for typing longer native texts, such as

setxkbmap "us,fi" -variant "altgr-intl," -option "grp:alt_shift_toggle"

The US intl variant is nice for having combos like AltGr+q for ä rather than separate accent/compose keys.

Re:QWERTZ auch

[Carewolf]

I occasionally have to type in French, but I can't stand using AZERTY.

Setting an English keyboard to Welsh/UK extended allows you to enter them with combinations of Alt-Gr and dead keys. Before I accidentally discovered this, I had to faff around with charmap.

There is also a keymap called US international that does something similar and turns the accents into dead-keys and the right-alt into AltGr. It makes writing real text with a US keyboard halfway plausible

Re:QWERTZ auch

[arglebargle_xiv]

Every single European keyboard seems like it's been designed by a committee to make it impossible to code in. French, German, Norwegian (the ones I've used), it's no wonder most of the world's major software comes from the US, every time you want to type a square bracket or tilde or hash you have to spend five minutes figuring out how to generate it. Even this UK keyboard for some stoopid reason moves punctuation (= coding) keys into odd corners, so the # is way down there but at least there's a handy  key for all the times you need to use it (zero, ever). I know European programmers who import US keyboards because they're the only ones you can sanely code in.

Re:QWERTZ auch

[fazig]

I managed to get used to the layout over time. At least when it comes to the plain and simple Cherry keyboards, that I've been using.
But, yes, a huge problem is that accessing those special keys totally interrupts the flow when typing. For example if I want to use curled brackets, which are extremely common when it comes to the syntax of various languages, then I have to either press Ctrl+Alt+7/0 or Right Alt+7/0. This means that I either have to take me left or right hand completely away from the default position in order to access these important keys. The French layout is even worse.

Re:QWERTZ auch

[arglebargle_xiv]

There's also the problem that, unless you know the specific magic trick to use, some quite critical characters simply can't be typed on a non-US keyboard. Try entering an email address using a German keyboard or the tri-valued keys on a French keyboard when you don't know the magic trick for the '@', for example. In the end I figured out that the easiest way to get it was with Ctrl-V, select the '@' from existing text and then hit Ctrl-V whenever you need to type it.

I feel your pain with the typing speed issues. Whoever decided the Norwegian keyboard needs to have keys for braces in the order {, [, ], } and only accessible via some AltGr combination needs to be killed and then eaten to prevent them from passing on the genes.

Re:QWERTZ auch

[fazig]

Yeah, that infamous Alt Gr key. Luckily, during the mid 90's, many German schools offered typewriting courses on Windows machines, where I at least learned how to use an @ properly.

Re:QWERTZ auch

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't get what's so difficult about it. The @ symbol is printed on german keyboards, and you just press Alt Gr together with the "Q" key.

Re:QWERTZ auch

[geggo98]

I am in a similar situation. But I got the pragmatic way: I use the keyboard layout "US International". With this layout you can get most accented character with combining keys: To get a 'ä', you first type ' " ' and then 'a'. With the same way you can get é, ù, Ö, etc.And it works the same, on Linux, Win and Mac. Only ß is different on each platform.

The big advantage (at least for coding) is that [{^@#|}] are really easy to reach. And usually I need these characters much more often than umlauts or French accents (although surprisingly many programming languages support unicode for variable names...)

Re:QWERTZ auch

[4im]

Every single European keyboard seems like it's been designed by a committee to make it impossible to code in. French, German, Norwegian (the ones I've used), it's no wonder most of the world's major software comes from the US, every time you want to type a square bracket or tilde or hash you have to spend five minutes figuring out how to generate it. Even this UK keyboard for some stoopid reason moves punctuation (= coding) keys into odd corners, so the # is way down there but at least there's a handy  key for all the times you need to use it (zero, ever). I know European programmers who import US keyboards because they're the only ones you can sanely code in.

I'm from Luxembourg. As we're stuck between French and German regions, we use swiss (they're in the same boat) keyboards, which provide for both languages (really only missing the german "ess-zett" which is replaced by double-s in swiss german). Thankfully, special characters as used in writing computer code are all present too, so while not everything is easily accessible, it's still ok for coding IMHO (even if I do prefer US in that context). One might imagine the EU to put together some monster-keyboard layout featuring all the characters normally used somewhere in europe and mandating its use... ups, let's not put ideas in their heads.

I have noticed grave omissions on (at least some) swiss Apple keyboards though - no @, no curly braces etc. (most of what's accessible via alt-gr), so unless you're used to it, you'll search for a long time e.g. if you simply want to send an email to somebody from some Apple machine.

Re:QWERTZ auch

[Anonymous Coward]

for all practical purposes including coding, the us layout works a lot better for me. It is only when having to write emails in german that i switch the layout to german. the actual printed layout on the keys however is something else again but that is easily ignored.

Re:QWERTZ auch

[stealth_finger]

but it has taken me ages to get used to coding on it.

Why not just have one keyboard for typing German and another for coding?

Re:QWERTZ auch

[Anonymous Coward]

Lots of strange complaints here. So what if a norwegian keyboard needs AltGr to get "{" and "}" ? That is a two-key combination for each. This is not easier on U.S. keyboards, where you instead needs SHIFT to type "{" and "}". Only the brackets are easier (single keypress), but there are not that many brackets in programming. Much more braces.

As for "@", it is a two-key combination (AltGr+2) on european keyboards. No harder than SHIFT+2 on american keyboards.
Not a magic trick - the lower symbol on a keycap is what you get when you press the key, the upper symbol (if any) is what you get with SHIFT, and the rigthmost symbol (if any) is what you get with AltGr. And "@" is printed to the right on the "2" key, so it is a straightforward AltGr combo.

I don't know why the french has such trouble "capitalizing accented characters". My Norwegian keyboard is set up with dead keys for accents, and so I capitalize with SHIFT for anything - accent or no accent. Typing äâãàá is easy, and so is ÄÂÃÀÁ. Well, I use four keys for an "Ã" - is that too hard for the French?

Re:QWERTZ auch

[halivar]

"ß" becomes "ss"

My understanding is that this particular replacement is now a journalistic standard in Germany.

Re:QWERTZ auch

[Anonymous Coward]

oe, ae, ue, ss

Just saved you hours off your day

Re:QWERTZ auch

[Anonymous Coward]

Living in a QWERTZ country, I often asked myself why don't everyone just remap @ to a numeric part of keyboard. Number 5 doesn't have much use when NumLock is off, so use that one.

Disclaimer: not applicable if you're using a sub15" laptop :D

Re:QWERTZ auch

[angel'o'sphere]

Sorry, your posts look like nonsense.

All the keys/letter needed for programming are clearly written on the keyboard. They are on odd places (for you) but easy to access via Alt-/Shift on a Mac or AltGr on a Windows machine. Windows however has funny bugs and strange registry keys to cope with it. E.g. during log in it might ignore the keyboard settings and simply decide: oh, it is a german language setting, so the keyboard must be german, too ... even if the keyboard for the user attempting to log in is set to american (and the UI for the whole machine is set to US but the users UI to German)

There is no need to buy an american keyboard either, facepalm, the keyboard is controlled by software, so you simply select the one you want. I for my part use a german base keyboard with a custom keyboard layout. On the A and O Umlaut I have the brackets and braces, with alt- I get the Umlauts. The caps- lock key is btw. modified to be a ctrl- key. However: I'm on a Mac ;) creating your own keyboard layouts with custom made layout is super simple.

Regarding the main article, looking at a french keyboard, it looks pretty efficient to me for typing french. For coding is another story.

Re:QWERTZ auch

[angel'o'sphere]

That is unfortunately not the case.

The spelling/writing got reformed and many words using sz now either use s or ss, nut there plenty of words that still use sz for some obscure reasons.

I for my part have no clue about the logic behind it (yes there is a damn rule behind, it but for 90% of the population that rule makes no sense, as they pronounce in daily ordinary german sz the same as s)

Re:QWERTZ auch

[Garfong]

In C or C++ you can type ?? to get curly brackets.

Re:QWERTZ auch

[fazig]

If I may ask: What do you find tedious about typing German with a German keyboard layout?
Other than that, I can't confirm that Germany officially discourages the use of accented letters. They did do it in the past, but not any more. For example I've got a lot of "ü" and "ß" on my ID card.

Freedom fries!

[__aaclcg7560]

It's French. What did you expect?

It's ok..

[cfalcon]

...QWERTY has been failing English typists for over a century!

Re:It's ok..

[Sable Drakon]

But at least QWERTY is 95% consistent in what keys perform what functions and where they are in the layout. French AZERTY isn't anywhere near that. France just needs to pick up the Canadian French layout, problem solved.

Re:It's ok..

[Anonymous Coward]

The whole "keyboard layout" thing is a barbaric relic. X11 compose key FTW.

Re:It's ok..

[Sable Drakon]

If you're using Linux, sure. But 98% of the world isn't. It's a Mac and Windows world, and MacOX can't use ComposeKey.

Re:It's ok..

[BarbaraHudson]

The canadian keys also have the compose key (alt-gris or alt-grey back in the old days)

Re:It's ok..

[Sable Drakon]

But those are hard-coded, their scancodes are pre-determined (X11 ComposeKey isn't, it's user-defined). French AZERTY also has a Alt-Gris key, that isn't the issue here. The issue is the lack of a consistent character mapping of French AZERTY keyboards. Meanwhile French Canadian keyboards are extremely consistent in their mapping.

Re:It's ok..

[markus]

I think that is mostly a myth. It intuitively seems plausible that a more optimized keyboard layout would allow typists to be more efficient than when typing on QWERTY.

And there certainly have been several studies that place layouts such as Dvorak ahead of QWERTY. But a closer look at these studies shows that they are all heavily biased and flawed. More scientifically thorough studies surprisingly give Dvorak only a tiny lead over QWERTY if even that. With adequate practice, a good typist is pretty damn fast no matter the layout; OTOH, even the nicest layout can't make up for lack of practice.

You are correct though that there are horrible keyboard layouts that end up slowing you down, no matter how much you practice. I don't have any first-hand experience with AZERTY. But maybe, it's one of those really bad layouts; I wouldn't want to rule that out. And there obviously is an advantage to have a standardized keyboard. QWERTY is one of those standards that are readily available in most parts of the world. There is something to be said about that being useful. And it's the main reason I personally never bothered learning Dvorak.

Finally, if you really want to get substantially faster than QWERTY, you have to look at cording keyboards in combination with lots of macros. That's how real-time transcription of speech works. But the learning curve is said to be incredibly difficult. So, definitely not something you'd want to do unless you really need it.

Re:It's ok..

[BarbaraHudson]

And that's the French's fault. I went to buy a new keyboard and came across some keyboards with big bright yellow keycaps and black lettering - would have been perfect for reduced vision until I saw that they were AZERTY. No wonder they were being dumped ultro-cheap by some importer who hoped nobody noticed until they got home, because NOBODY in Quebec or the rest of Canada uses AZERTY.

Re:It's ok..

[Anonymous Coward]

If you're using Linux, sure. But 98% of the world isn't. It's a Mac and Windows world, and MacOX can't use ComposeKey.

Got news for you, on a Mac, just hold down, e.g., the e key, for a moment, then select the accented e you want from the choices presented. (Works on IOS devices too.)
I find the Mac solution to be superior (and yes, I've been using X11 Compose since X11R5 circa 1993) because I don't have to remember possibly obscure compose sequences.
Then again, I can't hold down the $ key on the Mac and chose from £, €, ¥, , etc. You win some, you lose some.

Re:It's ok..

[HornWumpus]

But aren't the French Canadian keyboards missing two whole verb tenses? Or is that that the Mexican Spanish keyboards.

All these dialects get confusing.

Re: It's ok..

[Anonymous Coward]

QWERTY was designed to solve a problem with the hammer layout of a specific device in like 1900. It is preposterous to suggest that it does anything OTHER than suck, studies have shown it (and mostly only market supremacists argue otherwise), and the fastest typists avoid it.

Please quit fucking talking unless you have tried more than one layout exclusively for a year. How would you even fucking know. Ignorant.

Re:It's ok..

[Orphis]

Well, I'm using a French Mac layout and I can type ALL French letters, program and also type in Swedish using some Cmd+Key combo. Sure, I don't have the keys available right away, but it works. Also, on a Mac, Caps Lock really makes an uppercase letter, so it's easy to type an uppercase one with accent.
But typography rules use to say it was alright not to put accents on uppercase letters.
To that, you should add the fact that a LOT of people don't know how to write French properly and make tons of spelling errors when they write or type. I wouldn't expect most of them to care about any special characters or the proper uppercase letter!

Re:It's ok..

[Sable Drakon]

No idea.

Re:It's ok..

[alexhs]

I think that the English spelling has failed the English language from even before keyboards were invented, with the substitution of letters like thorn (not printed by Slashdot, though it is part of ISO-8859-1) with th that already had other pronunciations associated to it.

Look at orthographic depth. French is just as hard as English when you want to spell a word for which you have the pronunciation, however, when reading a word in French, apart from a few exceptions, you can reconstruct the pronunciation from the rules, where English is quite irregular (so, one-to-many vs many-to-many mappings).

Ironically, the Ars Technica article spells cafe instead of café.

In lower case, only ae (æ) and oe ligatures are missing from the French keyboard. Moreover, they're a PITA to type on Windows (alt code only) while there are sequences on OS X and Linux. Due to Bull SAS French engineers' stupidity (link in French), (oe) ligature is not in ISO-8859-1, which means Slashdot won't print it. Danes ensured that æ was in ISO-8859-1 (but it is much less used than oe in French). These ligatures are not typographical stylistic conventions, (oe) ligature is pronounced as é (like in, erm, café) when followed by a consonant where oe is pronounced o-e. For example, with words that are spelled and pronounced mostly the same in French and English: coexist, coelacanth. English lost the ligature, while it is present in French on the second word, which helps with the pronunciation.

In upper case, there are dead keys for ^, " and `, so Ô, Ï and È are not problematic. However, É and Ç again are a PITA on Windows. On Unix and OS X, one can use caps lock and the lower case letter. Upper case ÿ is also missing from ISO-8859-1, as it technically does not exist (no word begins with it , because " indicates that the letter is not pronounced together with the preceding letter), but ÿ is only used by old proper nouns, which sometimes have to be printed in all upper case.

Re:It's ok..

[frovingslosh]

...QWERTY has been failing English typists for over a century!

Yes, but by design.

Re:It's ok..

[Anonymous Coward]

From what I've seen, it's the other way around. The studies have been heavily biased to favour querty-users over dvorak. However, that's not the main problem as far as I'm concerned.

The really bad thing with querty - speaking as someone who's using the Swedish variant - is that it distributes the workload quite unevenly on your hands. The left hand gets basically all the letters, including several of the most frequently used ones, and the right gets basically all the quite infrequently used stuff. If you spend all day writing, the resulting fatigue is quite noticeable.

Re:It's ok..

[Anonymous Coward]

Argh, insomnia + posting + time delay for people without accounts = bad.. qwerty, of course, not querty.

Re:It's ok..

[Anonymous Coward]

If you want brilliant script, don't look at English or French, look at Russian, the monks that created Cyrillic defined very regular symbols, without the diacritics French suffers from, and without the "no real relationship to phonetics" English suffers from.

A page written in Russian can be read phonetically and the symbols are incredibly regular (and about the same number as in Latin). The slavic latinization in polish, OTOH, is an horror (lots of letters for one sound, like in Welsh, strange diacritics, such as l-stroke ).

In fact Latin sucks as representing non-latin languages, you end up either with weird symbol combos per sound (Welsh, Polish), heaps of diacritics (Vietnamese, American native languages), or something not phonetic at all (English). French is by no means the worst, it's sort of in the middle of all of those.

Re:It's ok..

[William Baric]

Which "Canadian French" layout? There are several of them. Windows still have three I can choose from, and that's not counting the ones which were dropped from Windows 95. And seriously, all "French Canadian" layouts suck. It would be better for France (and Quebec) to adopt the Bepo layout, or even better, to use the one the AFNOR promoted in the 90s and which was created specifically because it was thought, back then, that the AZERTY keyboard was bad.

Oh, and while we're at it, we could also drop the staggered key model. But that would require an actual use of intelligence, and that's something humanity is not used to.

Re:It's ok..

[toddestan]

The other nice thing about the Cyrillic alphabet is that lower case letters look just like the upper case letters, except smaller. In the English alphabet, some lower case letters are just like the upper case versions (like V and v, C and c, X and x), and some are not (G and g, A and a, E and e). It's something native English speakers don't even notice because we've grown up with it, but can be confusing to people trying to learn the language unless they are coming from another language that uses a similar alphabet.

new definition freedom

[Anonymous Coward]

currently not being censored, shot at, bleeding or detained... tears in the sky until the moms can finally stop crying all the time... see you there...

Canadian-French multilingual keyboard

[AchilleTalon]

Just buy the Canadian-French multilingual keyboard and map you keys accordingly and stop whining. The AZERTY keyboard is a real piece of shit, I don't know why it took so long to realize that to French people.

Re:Canadian-French multilingual keyboard

[Anonymous Coward]

The keyboard is fine, it's the language that is shit. No one can hear the difference between these 60+ symbols, so why isn't 26 enough for writing?
French is also discriminating to dyslectic people by inverting a spoken language that is totally different from the written language. I'm glad it's slowly being dropped as an official European language. English and German is plenty.

Re:Canadian-French multilingual keyboard

[c]

Just buy the Canadian-French multilingual keyboard

... unless you're a programmer. Then you have to choose between French and useful punctuation.

Re:Canadian-French multilingual keyboard

[Anonymous Coward]

Hell no! Canadian French is a *HUGE* pain in the ass to write with. A million times more so if you're a programmer or sysadmin. It's like, every other character you have to type becomes a weird and awkward key combo. It's so much of a PITA that it's typically faster to type with a plain en-us qwerty layout and to use alt-codes for the accents...

Re:Canadian-French multilingual keyboard

[stephanruby]

One possible solution is to improve the software itself.

I am French (living in the US) and I've actually stop using my PC when I need to compose a message in French, because I am actually much faster typing in French when I use my Android phone with SwiftKey.

And no, I don't really use its Swipe feature. SwiftKey has access to years of my Gmail messages, my texts, my Facebook account, and my Twitter account. And yes, it's not for users who value privacy from corporations (or the NSA I suppose). But I just need to enter one or two letters, and not only can it guess the word I'm trying to input, it can also guess the next words I am going to use.

And it's loaded with a French dictionary, so it does the accents perfectly, but at the same time, it allows me to use more than one language dictionary at a time, so if I use Frenglish, or purely Englsh, or if I use French with location names in English, it doesn't fight against me to do so (like a traditional one-language-at-a-time PC/Mac spell-checker would).

Re:Canadian-French multilingual keyboard

[Megane]

The French also fucked up Vietnamese romanization in the 17th century by filling it with dozens of accent combinations including combinations of two accent marks. There are so many combinations that VISCII uses sub-0x20 code points for printable characters.

Re:Canadian-French multilingual keyboard

[danbob999]

The Canadian so-called multilingual keyboard it shit and no one uses it except Apple. It has many flaws. The Canada French keyboard is much better. It can type all French characters while still being a QWERTY keyboard. France should use it too.

Re:Canadian-French multilingual keyboard

[Anonymous Coward]

Or get a Swiss keyboard - added benefit: Heavy Metal Umlauts!

Re:Canadian-French multilingual keyboard

[shutdown -p now]

Why stop at 26? Can anyone hear the difference between "i" and in "mist", and "y" in "mystery"?

Why have "c", when you have "k" and "s"?

Re:Canadian-French multilingual keyboard

[Anonymous Coward]

Just buy the Canadian-French multilingual keyboard and map you keys accordingly and stop whining. The AZERTY keyboard is a real piece of shit, I don't know why it took so long to realize that to French people.

Well, they're French...

Re:Canadian-French multilingual keyboard

[Anonymous Coward]

As opposed to everyone hearing the difference between "lead" and "lead". Be as silent as ghoti, you ka-niggit, we don't want you fonetic "capitol", "human" of no "principal". /raspberry

Re:Canadian-French multilingual keyboard

[Anonymous Coward]

It took about the time to replace civil servants that didn't type anything (there are secretaries for that), or don't know really how to type (it should be the secretaries' job) with the generation that accepts typing is part of real life.

Plus, it took Microsoft's fall, for people to be exposed to non-standard Apple French keyboards, themselves inspired from non-standard xorg keyboards, that added accented caps in azerty as soon as latin-15 was defined twenty years ago (see fr-latin9 and then fr-oss history in xkeyboard-config cvs, the second is configured by default on any decent floss desktop)

In fact the 'standard sucks' keyboards they complain about are PC made-for-windows keyboards, since MS is about the only OS that adheres strictly to the 'standard' which is missing keys.

And no, French is only marginally more complex in writing than English, there are more than enough keys on a PC-105 keyboard to expose all the keys needed by French, without resorting to an IME (aka MS Word).

It should be trivial to define a better standard, either taking the canadian multilingual layout as base, fr(oss) or bepo. fr(oss) is the worst of the lot since it was constrained to limit its changes to key combos not printed on standard azerty layouts. But it's also the easiest to transition to.

Re:Canadian-French multilingual keyboard

[Anonymous Coward]

"French is also discriminating to dyslectic people"

Not only them. Uneducated and primitive people are unfairly discriminated. Sorry for that.

"a spoken language that is totally different from the written language"

Do you really think spoken English is similar to written English ? You think so because you are English-speaking born. It is true that German and Spanish are easier to spell than French, but it is often impossible to know the pronounciation of English words by reading them.

"It's slowly being dropped as an official European language."

This is absolutely BS given demographical evolution in Europe at the moment, but anyway who cares ? French is becoming an African language: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/African_French

"English and German is plenty."
How good is your German ?

Re:Canadian-French multilingual keyboard

[Anonymous Coward]

Vietnamese were incredibly happy to be able to write their language with non-Chinese characteres because they could escape China's intelelctual pressure.

For this reason https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexandre_de_Rhodes is still honoured these days in Vietnam.

Re:Canadian-French multilingual keyboard

[Frederic54]

I agree, the keyboard we find everywhere in Québec is very easy to use (QWERTY and the number on the top row) and you can easily type ÇÉÀÜÎ whatever accentuated characters. Also most of them have the dual layout printed on each keys, so by switching the OS to US keyboard, any american could use it to type []{}#\| more easily

Re:Canadian-French multilingual keyboard

[angel'o'sphere]

If you are german, yes. .because we germans would pronounce it german biased and the first y in mystery would be a sound in the middle between an i (as in mist) and an german Umlaut u.

Re:Canadian-French multilingual keyboard

[shutdown -p now]

There are definitely languages out there that make good use of "y" (Norwegian is another good example). But I would argue that English is not one of them, at least not in this particular case.

Oh, also: "q". The single most useless letter of the Latin alphabet. Ironically, the languages that get most use of it are non-Indo-European (e.g. various Turkic ones, transliteration of Arabic etc - where it usually means IPA /q/).

Re:Canadian-French multilingual keyboard

[angel'o'sphere]

Yeah, but mystery is written with a 'y' in other languages, too.

So the similarity between mystery and Mysterium (german) would be gone if you change it to mistery.

Accents

[Anonymous Coward]

Apple did a good job with the "US keyboard" for extended characters. The best I know, in fact. Maybe they should look into it..

Re:Accents

[Anonymous Coward]

I guess you haven't used anything non-apple yet, or you'd realize just how false your statement is.

Almost any keyboard layout is better than Apple's for any non-english languages.

Maybe AZERTY is the only worse layout out there.

French Canadian

[Derf_X]

That's why we use the French Canadian layout (which if QWERTY) in Québec

Re:French Canadian

[ze_foster]

I like that Canadian keyboards have a "eh?" key.

Re:French Canadian

[Anonymous Coward]

That's éh, you cultural joke insensitive globüle!

Status: WONTFIX

[Anonymous Coward]

"Often, an accent is the only distinguishing factor between two similarly spelled words."

Sounds like a problem with the language, not the keyboard. WONTFIX

Re:Status: WONTFIX

[markus]

You could ignorantly say the same thing about several Asian languages. The fact of the matter is that there are more things than just vowels and consonants in human speech. Tone is very much an important part of language. Western languages usually don't put a lot of weight on tone to carry information, but French is notable exception. And even English sounds "funny" if implicit tone isn't pronounced properly.

Languages such as Mandarin, Cantonese, and Vietnamese are entirely unintelligible if tones aren't pronounced properly. In these languages, tones carry just as much information as vowels and consonants.

Japanese is apparently a language with a hidden tonal dependency. If you don't pronounce the tones properly, a native speaker won't be able to understand a word of what you are saying. But tones don't actually carry additional information. The correct tone can be derived from the rest of the sounds in the word. That's why Japanese words can be written in hiragana without needing any accent marks. To add extra complexity, tones do vary somewhat from region to region.

Re:Status: WONTFIX

[Anonymous Coward]

Western languages usually don't put a lot of weight on tone to carry information, but French is notable exception.

That's complete bullshit. French is NOT a tonal language. If anything, French is notable because neither stress nor pitch is phonemic; it absolutely lacks any 'tone' features whatsoever. eg. there are no 'an ADDress' / 'to addRESS' -like pairs.

The 'accents' in French do not mark any suprasegmental feature since at least some 600 years, they're simply a matter of spelling. Just like English, French has a traditional idiosyncratic spelling, the difference from English being that diacritics (especially the acute accent on e!) aren't just fluff -- you cannot omit them without turning the text into a mess; try substituting any j with i and any v with u in an English text for a similar effect.

Re: Status: WONTFIX

[Anonymous Coward]

Spoken like a true American idiot.

Why is this just coming up now?

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

The AZERTY layout was hammered out for some reason or other involving the typewriter market before the turn of the 20th century. If it's so awful, how did its suckitude escape official comment for this long? Especially weird when several other regions that speak substantial amounts of french have keyboard layouts that they seem happier with.

Re:Why is this just coming up now?

[93 Escort Wagon]

The choice probably had more to do with not having an English key layout rather than it actually being useful to French typists.

Re:Why is this just coming up now?

[Anonymous Coward]

So true. They would rather ban computers than use the English keyboard layout, in fact, the probably did just that for a while until France finally entered this century.

Re:Why is this just coming up now?

[freeze128]

On a typewriter, you can type a or e, and then backspace and then type an accent mark over the character you already typed. On a PC, it will REPLACE the character rather than just add it.

Re: Why is this just coming up now?

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually the French banned computers. They only use "ordinateurs" you see.

Re:Why is this just coming up now?

[Anonymous Coward]

No, this depends on software. I can type an accent and then a letter - and get an accented letter. Some programs will even show the accent waiting for the letter to be typed.

Re:Why is this just coming up now?

[angel'o'sphere]

That is why you type the accent first on a PC and the letter afterwards ;) works like a charm, at least on german keyboard layouts.

Makes me appreciate the English alphabet

[dlenmn]

I have to say, learning about other alphabets really makes me appreciate the English alphabet because it has fewer characters than many alphabets. The number of characters didn't matter much until machines that could reproduce written words became commonplace (typewriters, computers, etc.), but it's interesting how keyboards can drive the simplification of some alphabets. E.g. if it's simpler to type "oe" than find the "" character, you can guess what people choose to do (even though France’s culture and communication ministry doesn't approve).

Languages are always changing, and it's nice to see a force that simplifies them. If only there were some force that could drive English spelling reform...

Re:Makes me appreciate the English alphabet

[dlenmn]

Right, /. doesn't like Unicode. The missing character in quotes looks like an 'o' and 'e' smashed together.

Re:Makes me appreciate the English alphabet

[Sable Drakon]

The 'oe' ligature.

Re:Makes me appreciate the English alphabet

[AxeTheMax]

I hope you also appreciate the huge effort that English speakers have to make to be able to become literate with those few characters. The 26 letters were designed for Latin. Almost all modern European languages have a more complex sound system, and English more so than most, coupled with a whole collection of contradictory spelling rules inherited from French, Latin, Greek, et.c.. The result is an effort put into literacy that is only comparable with Chinese and its ideograms. In fact, many English words are comparable to ideograms in having little relation to the letters that go into them.

Re:Makes me appreciate the English alphabet

[BarbaraHudson]

"The oe and ae ligatures need to be tied up and have the crap beaten out of them."

• ---- Aesop's fables.

Re:Makes me appreciate the English alphabet

[meerling]

You realize of course that the English language has 40 phonems, but only 26 letters, and of those letters, you can make up for some of the missing sounds by using 2 letter combinations (for example 'th' and 'sh' ), but then there are the letters that have multiple sounds, as well as multiple letters having the same sound. The alphabet used for English is a F-ing mess! You'd think it was designed by bored monks in the middle ages that were either stoned, drunk, or both.

Re:Makes me appreciate the English alphabet

[Hognoxious]

contradictory spelling rules inherited from French, Latin, Greek, et.c..

French is derived from Latin (and is French) and has a moderately sensible spelling system, so it's not that.

The reason for English having so many spelling irregularities is down to William Caxton, who introduced the printing press at precisely the wrong time - the language was a) different across regions and b) in a state of flux. Plus, many of his staff were Belgians, which doesn't help.

Re:Makes me appreciate the English alphabet

[Anonymous Coward]

There is also the "great vowel shift", which killed the correlation between spelling and pronounciation.
I'm French, actually, but I live in Spain and can't stand French keyboards. Spanish keyboard is a good compromise, it's QWERTY based and allows to easily type Spanish (obviously), English, and is better for French than standard French keyboard ("Shift-ç" actually gives "Ç").
The only missing thing on Spanish keyboards are oe and ae ligatures, but it's fine for programming ("{[]}" need AltGr but easily accessible), only "~" is missing but mapped to "AltGr-ñ".

Re:Makes me appreciate the English alphabet

[Anonymous Coward]

French has a moderately sensible spelling system? Words are spelled with tons of extra letters that you never pronounce. Just one example of countless: "chateaux", pronounced "sha-to".

There are many reasons for English spelling being such a mess, but you cannot discount the French (Norman) damage done to it.

It's not so much the letters

[Hognoxious]

The punctuation is a real bastard. I find it really hard to do < > since they're on the same key.

It's just a Windows (and possibly OSX) problem

[Anonymous Coward]

It's *that* simple.

The problems mentioned in the article (how to generate capitals for letters with accents or diacritics) are Windows-specific, and relevant for more languages than French (for instance, Italian keyboards have the same problem too)

Under Windows, if you press the key corresponding to a letter with an accent, you will *always* get the lowercase version of it, even if you have caps lock enabled. So there is no easy way to get the right capitals. Even under Word you need to use SHIFT+F3 to capitalize the entire word, otherwise you'd end up writing CHâTELET.

Under X11, enabling caps lock gets you the corresponding capital letter.

Re:It's just a Windows (and possibly OSX) problem

[Anonymous Coward]

This, M$ pushes all kinds of strange UI changes yet keeps this awful behaviour which leads to random lowercase letters.

Re:It's just a Windows (and possibly OSX) problem

[PCM2]

I just tried it on Windows 10 with the English International keyboard and it does not exhibit the behavior you describe. Caps Lock works just fine with accented characters.

Seems like something software could handle

[MikeRT]

This is seems more like a UX issue where they should be getting some focus groups together to try some new software short cuts.

Re:Seems like something software could handle

[Anonymous Coward]

That's what they are planning to do, plus they will aubmit a standard where said shortcuts are drawn on the keys.

Simple. Use an ABNT2 keyboard.

[Anonymous Coward]

It's a Brazilian one. Just search for an image (ABNT2, not ABNT keyboard -- a previous standard). BTW, keyboard in Portuguese is "teclado".

Let me see (I'm on Linux Mint):

a: `-à -á ^-â ~-ã -ä
e: `-è -é ^-ê ~- -ë
i: `-ì -í ^-î ~- -ï
o: `-ò -ó ^-ô ~-õ -ö
u: `-ù -ú ^-û ~- -ü

Shifted (uppercase) works as well. E.g.: ÂÊÎÔÛ etc.

When don't use all that. These things are not used in Portuguese:

î (used in French)
ò (in Italian)
ñ (in Spanish)

Also, what the summary mentions: ç (lower case) and Ç (uppercase) -- I don't recall any word starting in Portuguese with "Ç". But we use uppercase cedilla in titles.

All words ending in "-tion" are written with "ção" in Portuguese:

resolution - resolução
option - opção
production - produção (producção used in Portugal)

This is so important that we should have two special keys on our Brazilian keyboards: a with tilde (ã) and perhaps also o with tilde (õ). But we don't. :-/

resolution - resolução, but
resolutions - resoluções

Some extra things work on Linux (I don't know about Windows): , , , , among others.

There's also some AltGr symbols like AltGr-M (), -C (©), -R (®), etc. AltGr-J produces interesting diacritics used in other languages (like possibly Czech or Vietnamese): , ... who knows what will /. make out of those... yep, destroyed in the good old American tradition.

I also discovered how to type an Esperanto char "" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C5%AC) and a Japanese one "" (used in Bash, for instance). See this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matsuo_Bash%C5%8D .

Of course, one can always use a ComposeKey (in KDE, go to System Settings / Input Devices / Keyboard ("Advanced" tab).

It will be funny to read this post here. In a deranged way, I mean.

Actually, preview already has shown a sad rendering. :-(

A relic from the past

[peppepz]

The set of characters present on many European keyboards was defined by the ancient localized ASCII encodings, ISO 646. Yes, there were non-US versions of ASCII, that contained funny characters in the lower 7 bit range. This allowed for a very limited amount of regional characters (around 10), and as a result many useful characters were omitted, such as uppercase variants and precise diacritics. This is not only a problem for the French, and it isn't due to the AZERTY/QWERTY difference.

Re:A relic from the past

[Anonymous Coward]

The only useful comment on this page.

Re:A relic from the past

[RightwingNutjob]

Which is yet another reason that the rest of the world needs to start speaking English. Just like in Star Trek.

Re:A relic from the past

[Big Hairy Ian]

ISO646??? You do realize the keyboard layouts being discussed date back to the 19th century way before the first serious computers (Babbage aside) were around ISO646 tried to make sense of these for early computing but basically I think we're talking code pages here

Re:A relic from the past

[angel'o'sphere]

Do you realize that german typewriter keyboards never had \ []{}?
They came to computers with ISO norms ...

Re:A relic from the past

[Big Hairy Ian]

Which were added to existing keyboard layouts which were already designed with the sole purpose of slowing typists down to a speed the then mechanical hardware could cope with

Obvious joke

[rossdee]

"The keyboard won't type French Letters"

Bot the French are Catholics so that shouldn't be a problem.

Re:Obvious joke

[Anonymous Coward]

Not so obvious to the young 'uns, I suspect. So here's a clue for them.

Re:Obvious joke

[angel'o'sphere]

Most french are atheists.
I would even bet that the percentage of muslims is higher than that of 'true catholics'. Even the jew population could be more.

The AZERTY layout was hammered out for some reason

[whathappenedtomonday]

For "some reason", the word 'typewriter' can be typed using keys from the top row only on a QWERTY keyboard. Thing is, changing keyboard layout standards is probably even more difficult than agreeing on spelling reforms. Old dogs, new tricks and all that ...

all modern, latin keyboards suck

[dshk]

At the very first sight it must have been obvious that this layout was useless. Like all modern Latin layouts. Among other reasons, these layouts have only one third level shift key, the AltGr, on the right side. There is no AltGr on the left side. Conversely, there is no Alt key on the right side. So you cannot touch type text on this if you are a user, and you cannot touch type commands if you are a developer.

The progress of keyboard layouts stalled after the Space-cadet keyboard from the 1970s. After that the dark age of keyboards began. Nowdays the ErgoDox keyboard is the most useful for typing accented characters, it has less keys than the usual keyboard in total, but more keys which are accessible for a touch typist. But ErgoDox is only the hardware, there are no standardized international layouts for it.

The English alphabet sucks

[taniwha]

What's to appreciate -English also needs lots of simplification - 'c', 'k', 's' pick two of them, make them always sound different, 'q' can go ('kw' does the job in "Bridge over the river Kwai"), 'g' or 'j' pick one, toss the silent 'h' and the silent 'k' - 'gh'->'f', etc etc

We can probably get down to 20 letters if we try hard

English is an insane polygot mess it's long past time we tossed all that useless history from it

Re:The English alphabet sucks

[AxeTheMax]

Well, if you really want to try hard enough to reduce the keyboard, you can get everything down to two characters. That's usually 1 and 0, but you would have a lot of choice.

Re:The English alphabet sucks

[tepples]

We can probably get down to 20 letters if we try hard

Irish got it down to 18 (abcdefghilmnoprstu, with h replaceable by a combining dot), but Irish spelling is as messed up as French.

Re:The English alphabet sucks

[angel'o'sphere]

Actually you system makes no sense.
Or do you really want to adjust the way you speak to the way you write? Yeah, you argue the opposite, but that is what you are doing. The G on George might be replaceable by a J but the g in go, not so. If you listen to british english, I really wonder why they did not enhance their alphabet, like most other european folks did. You might find german umlauts confusing, however the words where they are used in, are simply spoken different. So it makes sense (the s z not so much).

Accidents of history

[jgotts]

The reason why typewriters and computer keyboards are so US centric is that the English-speaking world happened to be at the top of its game when these products were created. First it was Great Britain and its territories and then the United States. The language of computer science is English. Computer scientists use less Latin than any other scientist that I'm aware of. All common programming languages are based upon the language of mathematics, which is Latin with symbols. English is close enough: All common programming languages read left-to-right, top to bottom. All common programming languages are alphabetic and use mainly SVO, subject-verb-object, just like English. The keywords in all common programming languages are English words. The punctuation marks are the same or more similar to English than any other language. You could say that all common programming languages are Latin with symbols, written in English.

This is why it is easier to be a programmer for a native English speaker than for any other person. Everything fits like a glove, because we invented a large portion of this technology, not because we're any better than any other person. (*)

As China rises, we're beginning to see things like electronics data sheets written in Chinese with an English translation as an afterthought. Quite clearly the standard computer keyboard is only natural for English users. It's utterly horrible for the Chinese. Imagine if the keyboard was created in the Far East. Our 26 letter alphabet with no accent marks would be the afterthought. Programming languages might have been mostly symbol-oriented with Chinese symbolic keywords. We might have needed to be fairly good Chinese speakers to be any good at programming. Future technologies could be like this.

Any contact with an alien race would be more of the same. We could have roughly the same technology but vastly different ways of interacting with it, depending upon whatever culture was dominant when it was created.

(*) I'm aware that QWERTY was designed to slow down typists but it's actually extremely well suited to type English. All 26 letters and the common punctuation marks require a single keypress, and they're all right at our fingertips.

Dutch also have their own layout, no one uses it

[Anonymous Coward]

So the Dutch also have a keyboard layout.
It is QWERTY with some punctuation keys moved around.

When you buy a computer online many companies like Apple have the default selected keyboard be the Dutch layout, which is kind of silly since no one wants a Dutch keyboard layout. Many times people have to return the computer (when it is a notebook) to get an English Intl. layout. To be honest Apple doesn't even blink when you ask them to return it because of the keyboard layout.

Interestingly it is almost the same with the Windows operating system. Almost every company in the Netherlands uses the English version. But somehow it is very difficult to get the English version of window as a consumer. It is now a little bit better with language packs, however my windows 10 install still speaks Dutch with me once in a while.

The Dutch version of windows is difficult to use by Dutch people, because we mostly use English terms when talking about computers. The Dutch version is more useable by Flamish Belgiums since they hold on to the Dutch language more and translate English computer terms.

Distinguishing similarly spelled words

[jeffb (2.718)]

Often, an accent is the only distinguishing factor between two similarly spelled words.

Why not just take the same approach English does, where often there is NO distinguishing factor between similarly spelled words -- they're simply spelled identically, even though they're pronounced differently and have different meanings? Read and read, abuse and abuse, permit and permit, wind and wind... the list goes on and on.

Re:Distinguishing similarly spelled words

[Anonymous Coward]

The summary is misleading. Sometimes, accents are used to disambiguate words that are pronounced exactly the same AND have identical spelling (modulo the accents). For example, "dû" (masculine past participle of "devoir", which is the upstream source of English "due") and "du" (contracted form of "from the" or "of the", or singular indefinite masculine article), "là" ("here") and "la" (feminine 3rd person accusative pronoun, or feminine definite article). In French it is almost impossible for two words with identical spelling (including accents) to sound different.

Re:Distinguishing similarly spelled words

[Anonymous Coward]

Everybody recognizes the problem has to do with the layout that was normalized in the 60s. The correct solution is to fix the layout. Regarding your suggestion, the answer is in your comment. It adds ambiguities, which is something linguists have fought against for centuries. What could be done is top adopt a system to replace accents by letter combination like oe in German when "umlaut o" is missing, but this adds even more complexity to a language which is already complex... Your suggestion to remove accents suddenly adds hundreds of ambiguities to the language is probably not the best. Also your proposal requires to legislate language, and even slightest changes are fought against in most places. It took more than 20 years for last (fairly minimal) changes to French to start being accepted, and changes to Portuguese currently face large rejection from both regular folks and some well-known writers.
More importantly, accents in French are not used only to distinguish words with similar writing. Their fundamental purpose is to help the reader select the correct pronunciation for the word, even when their is no other similar word.
Finally, many features of the language only exist for historical reasons. English is also full of these things. Take the transliteration from Greek, where phi letter is written ph (word "pharmacy") or letter Chi written "ch" (psychology) . You could write ph swith f like in Spanish and ch with a k like in Finnish. Still English retains ph and ch because they have been there for centuries, jus tlike accents in French.

Re:Distinguishing similarly spelled words

[jeffb (2.718)]

Perhaps we could get rid of accented characters entirely, and use the resulting codespace for other much-needed symbols like the "sarcasm indicator".

I'm definitely not one to leap to English's defense, nor to hold it up as an example for other languages to emulate. It's a terrible mess, from top to bottom. Then again, few natural languages aren't.

Re:Distinguishing similarly spelled words

[Anonymous Coward]

La and là are pronounced differently in acadien french, at least the acadiens I know (New Brunswick). The first is a 'higher' sound, the second is a lower sound (almost like a 'luh' sound). These dialects have retained some pronunciations that aren't found in le français standard. For example: you can hear the difference between the future simple and the conditionnel - e.g. je regarderai sounds a little different from je regarderais. The first is pronounced pretty much the standard way. The second is s slightly flatter sound. But other french people don't even hear the difference - i said them over and over to a parisien and he thought I was making the same sound, even when I said it very slowly.

Re: Dutch also have their own layout, no one uses

[Anonymous Coward]

Why do you hate your own language so much?

So someone has finally noticed...

[rduke15]

It took them quite a long time to realize what everybody else has always known. Yes AZERTY sucks. And as someone who lives in a neighboring country, I sometimes come across these crazy keyboards. The problem is not just that the keyboard is impractical. It is mainly that it is so wildly different from all other keyboards.

The problem is aggravated by OS installers like Windows, which insist that if you are installing a French version of Windows, you must need a French AZERTY keyboard which makes typing on normal non-AZERTY physical keyboard quite difficult. Only much later can you tell the system to throw away that idiocy and select a normal keyboard like Swiss, Belgian or Canadian for French.

How about you change the French writing

[Anonymous Coward]

Well, is the keyboard the problem or the language?

If French was written phonetically, you could survive with 37 characters, where many characters (like the nasals) would not even need an uppercase letter.

When there is e.g. 27 different ways to write phonetic 'o', you start to wonder, if a little bit of optimization could help the language.

Well, we have to understand first the reason...

[Ummite]

QWERTY and AZERTY have been created to minimize the possible jam of dactylo, around 1872, not to be fast but to prevent jamming. If letters were presented in alphabetical order, we would have "ST" for example offen used and would create dactily jam. Now that dactylo era is over, some alternatives exists like "Dvorak Bépo".

So create one that suits you

[bhetrick]

So change the keyboard layout to something you like. I personally use Dvorak with a dozen accents as dead keys; the only accents I actually use are for Esperanto, but still... On Windows, https://www.microsoft.com/en-u....

karma

[frovingslosh]

Yup, seems like karma to me. I'm perfectly willing to let them ditch their crappy language and switch to the English language and English keyboards, but they don't seem to like that either.

What??

[JustAnotherOldGuy]

Only terrorists use accented letters.

Use the regular, gawd-fearin' ENGLISH letters, the way gawd intended 'em to be used, ya gawdless savages!

Re:What??

[Anonymous Coward]

LATIN letters.

Taken from Greeks
Adapted from Phenicians
Long descendant from Egyptian's hieroglyps.

Re: What??

[Anonymous Coward]

Your knowlegde of historical matters is suspect. Reported.

QWERTY was designed to be inefficient

[140Mandak262Jamuna]

When the first typewriters came in 19th century they were prone to jamming a lot. The actual levers will lock. I have done it myself with a Smith Corona. So one solution was to make it difficult to type fast. So they deliberately made the layout strange and difficult to type fast. But looks like the Europeans made it even more difficult than ill designed QWERTY. Serves them right for using such funny symbols on letters to change the pronunciation. But after all that accent marks to guide them they still pronounce words very strangely. The later half of ALL French words seem to be silent. I think it best for them to give up all those variants and adopt English as their language.

Re:QWERTY was designed to be inefficient

[ruir]

Here we actually had QWERTY, HCESA and AZERTY for a while... AZERTY never took off, HCESA fortunately died together with mechanical typewriters. If my father did not put it in the trash, we still have an HCESA typewriter at home.

Why not English?

[Anonymous Coward]

English is the modern language of business. 26 letters, 26 keys on the keyboard. Using alt+codes repeatedly just to type a document is ridiculous.

Part of the solution is...

[Peter (Professor) Fo]

Have a 'decoration key' that adds accents (etc) to undecorated symbols.
I've done this for Windows and Javascript with a really sweet UI

See http://vulpeculox.net/ax

This is a practically no-learn UI because the same key is used for everything. Want to turn '2' into 'squared' or 'P' into 'pawn' (for chess addicts) or do your French homework using a single key? Then have a look.

And the problem is I don't know how to make it more universal. Mac? Linux? Smartphones? I've no idea, but the feedback on the UI has been 100% so why not have a look and see if you can implement the really simple algorithm?

Re:Part of the solution is...

[dshk]

This is a good idea, which should be implemented on every OS, but is is only useful for rarely typed accents. I do not know French, but in my language there are 4 different accented variant of O. Even if the order of the accents are customized to the language so that it reflects the real life frequency of those accents, it would be unacceptable to type 5 keys to get a single character. Another issue in the example is that on the usual standalone and laptop keyboards the function keys cannot be touch typed. On a standard keyboard there is no easily accessible keys which is free or which can be replaced, there is no place for dedicated accent keys and there is also no place for a symmetric (both left and right) third level shift keys. Only a new type of keyboard hardware can help, with more accessible keys. (Or older type of hardware: on some pre-PC era keyboards this problem was solved.)

Re:Part of the solution is...

[Anonymous Coward]

Looks to me that compose key system is better: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

Canadian Bilingual KB

[CanEHdian]

Just use the Canadian French (Bilingual) keyboard in France as well. Simple comme bonjour.

Re:Canadian Bilingual KB

[Cassini2]

The Canadian multi-lingual keyboard is a disaster. It changes the shape of some of the most important keys on the keyboard, like ENTER, SHIFT and Backslash. Any touch typist familiar with a standard US keyboard, can't type on the multi-lingual keyboard. However, to support French, about 1/2 of the keyboards in the marketplace are Canadian multi-lingual. Nobody can type on anything, unless they get the right kind of keyboard,, or type slowly.

All this would be somewhat great if Canadian multi-lingual keyboard was multi-lingual. However, it isn't. I don't even think it has all the French letters either. Once you get into other languages, even romantic languages, the keyboard doesn't have the right keys.

The Canadian multi-lingual keyboard is the classic Canadian compromise. It makes no one happy, and no one completely upset.

Serves you right

[Anonymous Coward]

Devise a better writing system next time!

Accent inference engine?

[Latent Heat]

We have computers offering grammar and spelling checkers. Spelling checkers are not only active in MS-Word, they can be found on text entry on many Web pages.

Do you suppose a well-designed auto-correct system could make inferences regarding the selection of the word and automatically supply the accents? Or if there is ambiguity, to have a popup selection of alternative orthography -- just like in Visual Studio, Eclipse, or other such text-entry system for an (artificial programming) language?

We are talking about the Singularity being only 10-20 years away, and we don't have computer systems that cannot make reasonable assumptions to supply the accents in the French language?

Language of computer science . . .

[Latent Heat]

I thought it was the dialect of Swedish spoken in parts of Finland . . .

Mo Jo Risen

[Anonymous Coward]

Risen Risen.

Mo Jo Risen.

French is a thing of the past

[Archfeld]

There is a reason French is no longer recognized as the diplomatic language with any real world significance. They exist in the past and refuse to advance into the present, much less proceed into the future...

Re:French is a thing of the past

[Nethead]

Which is also why the French company I work for has 70 odd Domino Notes servers around the world.

Re:French is a thing of the past

[Archfeld]

OOOOHHH man hopefully you are not tasked with maintaining those dinosaurs :)

Compose key

[Anonymous Coward]

If you also write code, dead keys are terrible. I use compose key as is explained in this book. https://www.createspace.com/3758226

Get a Swiss keyboard

[Anonymous Coward]

They are better designed. No surprise here. You can type German, French, Italian and English with the same ease.

start from language

[Anonymous Coward]

well my recommendation to frenchies is to throw away part of alphabet and majority of grammar :) the language is ridiculously hard to learn with every rule followed with ton of exceptions. you do not need five variants of E. you do not need fifteen or more tenses to impress ladies, five is more than enough to ask for casual fu.. i mean unhygienic love. and definitely drop the written form of this language, as it is very different from spoken one: every time i read a french letter, i feel like i missed a century.

veuillez agreer l'expression de mes sentimens les meilleurs,
best regards,
m.

Developers

[NaughtyNimitz]

We have a simple saying in Belgium amongst developers: If you use an AZERTY-keyboard, you are NOT a developer.
Also, the Dutch have QWERTY, but the Dutch-speaking part of Flanders uses AZERTY, because we are part of schizophrenic country...

Re:Developers

[dave1791]

I use a German QWERTZ for everyday use, but when I'm writing code, I use a QWERTY as not having to use alt keys is a big bonus.

Re: Dutch also have their own layout, no one uses

[Anonymous Coward]

He must be a terrorist.

In practice

[Peter (Professor) Fo]

The rapidity with which a key can be repeated makes it quick and soon automatic. There's no time wasted hunting for a particular key. I take your point about the horribleness of laptops but that's a choice people make depending on what they perceive their priorities are.

Re:Dutch also have their own layout, no one uses i

[NaughtyNimitz]

As a Flemish Belgian ( I am not Flaming about it, wink wink) , I use QWERTY and Mac OS X English International. Always have (since OS X came out) and always will , and this , among others, due to the keyboard shortcuts that correspond to the info found in books and on internet. There's vastly more info in English than in Dutch. The funny thing is, about 50% of Mac owners I know, also have the English version, but alas, the suffer from that French-influenced disease called AZERTY.
(Long time ago, some asshat introduced AZERTY to ALL Belgians because... feck those Flemish people)

Lowercase letters missing too

[MisterBuggie]

The article gives examples that don't apply to all French. However, there is no letter on the French keyboard, which is necessary for spelling words like egg and heart. Also the æ, less common, is used in latin expressions and names like Lætitia. Yes, some people can't spell their name on the computer.

There is a French equivalent for the DVORAK layout, called BÉPO. It has gained a certain popularity, but can only go so far as it's a lot of work learning a completely new keyboard layout. It is also a little awkward for typing in English as the W is way out on the right hand side. But that's what I use, and my typing is a lot faster and more accurate than it ever was with AZERTY.

Re:Lowercase letters missing too

[MisterBuggie]

Hrm. There is no oe letter on the AZERTY keyboard. And slashdot won't even let me post it, it just vanishes from my post.

Chromebooks are worst

[Anonymous Coward]

And they forgot about Google's idiotic one-handed replacement of caps locks with search in chromebooks, which breaks access to some symbols even on Layouts that should enable typing ÉÀÇÈÙÆ

(Yes caps are not much use in the USA; no the USA is not the world. At least MS added its own vanity to keyboards, it didn't replace existing ones)

The problem isn't the keyboard layout

[Cley Faye]

One more time, our government (this time the ministry of Culture) say some stupid things without even thinking. I bet one of them sat in front of his computer, tried to type 'À', failed, then decided "I need someone to do this for me".
I also bet this person use Windows, and never asked anyone or searched the web on how to type this kind of characters.
Now, typing special characters (diacritics, elision, this kind of stuff) needs a keyboard combination. On Linux system, you can define a Compose key. On OSX as far as I know, there's something similar to do so. Guess who isn't playing nice with special characters here? Yup. The big champ of OS.
So, either they make a keyboard with a ton of "special character keys" only to allow windows user to type capital diacritics, while removing all the other non special characters, because a 150-key keyboard is not happening, or they man up a bit and ask for all OS providers to give an easy, accessible way to type diacritics. And most of them, having the mean to do so already, will certainly comply.

Linux cloned AT&T UNIX

[tepples]

...by the author of Linux? That's a clone of an operating system developed by American Telephone and Telegraph. Mobilizing your world.

No Unicode on /. because trolls

[tepples]

Slashdot still doesn't support Unicode?

Slash deliberately has broken Unicode support because of past abuses by vandals, such as bidirectional overrides to spoof moderation scores and characters more useful in obscene "ASCII art" (really Unicode art) than in English prose. Rehash, the fork of Slash used on SoylentNews, fixes Unicode support.

Shul is Yiddish for synagogue

[tepples]

They get mad when I point out that school is pronouned sk.

Unless it's run by a Jewish synagogue. Then it is pronounced as if it were "shool".

Dvorak for life

[Anonymous Coward]

Qwerty and ALL variables suck. We all know qwerty was "developed" over 120 years ago to slow typists using problematic gravity assisted ink hammers on the first typewriters...

Re:The AZERTY layout was hammered out for some rea

[Anonymous Coward]

For "some reason" the word 'assfag' can be typed using keys from the left hand middle row only on a QWERTY keyboard.

case study

[Anonymous Coward]

as a french, to type french, and especially accents (even on an azerty keyboard), I first type
setxkbmap -layout us -variant intl

Spanish keyboard is actually better for French!

[Anonymous Coward]

As a French living in an Hispanic country, I find the Spanish keyboard (QWERTY) much, much easier than the French one for typing French text! The accents are accessed by preceding the letter by a dead key, so no issue with caps. Numbers are accessed normally (no need to press shift as with AZERTY). And it is also reasonably comfortable for coding, although nothing beats US keyboard for that I guess (well, you can't have everything). France should switch to the Spanish keyboard!

QWERTY even worse for them

[trigggl]

I've worked for a French company for 16 years. On occasion, one of our co-workers will come to the US to train us in some new program they give us. One of them was trying to show me some feature I was asking him about. He was having a lot of fun finding keys on my faded keyboard. Apparently, de "D" is in a different place.