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

[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

[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

[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.)

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

[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

[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

[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.

It's ok..

[cfalcon]

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

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.

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: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: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?

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:The more you tighten your grip...

[ColdWetDog]

You looser ....

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.

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...

[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...

[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.