I bought a bluetooth keyboard in Taiwan and thought it was so fascinating how it's labelled for 4 different input methods. It's a very cool and unique souvenir!
Obviously there's the Latin alphabet (QWERTY) in the top left, zhuyin fuhao/bopomofo in the top right, and I figured one of the bottom ones was Cangjie. What the fourth could be was a mystery to me.
After some quick searching, I learned that Cangjie is in the bottom left, and the bottom right is the Dayi input method, which I've never even heard of. Here is a better look.
So far I have only used this keyboard to type in English or Chinese with the pinyin input method, but I’ll have to experiment with one of the other ones sometime—probably bopomofo since I am more familiar with it.
Out of curiosity, I looked up what a Taiwanese MacBook keyboard looks like, and it only has the Latin alphabet and zhuyin. So the 4-in-1 style isn't universal it seems.
I did something highly eccentric over the past two weeks—I keylogged myself.
I was curious how many of the dozens of custom shortcuts I actually use. And also, yes, curious what someone who did keylog me would actually see. (Of course all my passwords are in the file—it's interesting to think of a way of obfuscating that.)
It'll take me a while to comb through (not to mention the extreme amount of sed I need to use to parse the file), but a couple fun facts:
I am a serial backspacer. Backspace is my third-favorite key to press, after the spacebar and "e".
While I heavily lean towards the left shift key, I do use the right shift occasionally; 3 percent of all my shifts are the right one.
When I first got into linguistics, I decided I needed a keyboard that could support IPA¹. But I was studying Sanskrit, and switching to a completely different keyboard every time I wanted to add a dot below a character (the common Sanskrit transcription convention) was really annoying! Also, I hate the IPA character for a palatal nasal (ɲ), so I wanted to be able to use 'ñ' instead. And ... a thousand other tiny things, all requiring different keyboard layouts. Why wasn't there a keyboard that just let me type EVERYTHING?
Eventually, I designed my own. And that was fun enough that I expanded it. Over the last 15 years, I've been adding characters and streamlining it's use.
The current iteration is a monster. For an idea of what it can do:
this keyboard can type over 50 diacritics (accent marks)
it can rotate and flip any character that has a rotated/flipped Unicode counterpart, as well as replace them with smallcaps, superscript, and subscript versions
it can type most medieval ligatures and characters (though my research hasn't always been good enough to provide the most natural ways to do so)
it covers the whole IPA, of course, as well as historical symbols, extIPA, and uppercase forms when available
it can type any modern or historical click character available in Unicode (still waiting for Doke orthography support >:( )
it allows you to type Greek and Cyrillic characters (though it prioritizes IPA variants and isn't really streamlined for writing the language)
it allows you to transliterate Sanskrit, Ancient Egyptian, Chinese dialects, etc. that use discipline-specific characters/diacritics
it lets you add bars, tildes, slashes and curls to any character that has a matching Unicode counterpart
it can type most proofing and punctuation marks, modifier characters, as well as
alchemical, astrological, and gender/orientation symbols
and much more
For more detailed documentation on what this keyboard supports, and how to use it, here's the guide (PDF or Word Doc).
Here's the keyboard: IPAKeyboard dot kmp
Because it's designed to work for a LOT of characters, this keyboard is rarely going to be the simplest way to type a specific one. There are definitely IPA-only keyboards that will be more efficient for typing just IPA. And this keyboard isn't a font. There will be characters that don't show up - I've yet to find one that supports the entire range of characters this keyboard allows. Doulos SIL is my suggested font, especially if you use a lot of diacritics, but you might want to look around to find the one that supports you best.
But it's a powerful tool if you want to be able to switch between multiple transliteration and transcription systems in the same document, explore characters to use for non-human sounds, discuss the history of transcribing language, or quickly type special characters without opening 'insert symbols' dialogue boxes.
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This is a Keyman keyboard. You'll need to install Keyman before being able to use it. Keyman is a free program with some amazing keyboards, and a lot of supports for people designing them for underserved languages. I've been really happy with it for almost 20 years, now.
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For ideas about what else I could add, or suggestions for better key combos for specific characters, please contact me here, or at kiragecko at gmail dot com.
Things I'd love ideas for:
medieval ligatures (need to match them to logical character strings (words), but these are frequently NOT what unicode suggests)
mathematical, geometric, and/or scientific symbols (huge numbers of symbols, need a logical way of organizing them without too many key strokes)
Teuthonista symbols (very little English documentation, so I don't know what all of them MEAN)
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¹ The International Phonetic Alphabet, one of the main ways linguists indicate sounds.
I am going to teach myself a different keyboard layout. Neo, which is very different from QWERTZ (which I am used to).
Why would I put myself through this? I can type pretty fast with QWERTZ, thanks to years of doing it a lot (never learned it properly though).
There's a few reasons, the latest that is currently tipping me over the ledge being that typing anything in Turkish with a bog standard German QWERTZ layout requires me to copypaste all the special characters from a character table, which is seriously no fun. And switching keyboard layouts just for a word or three – meh, no, uncool. Functional but uncool.
But learning a whole different keyboard layout that will enable me to write things in sooooo many languages? And generally type even more efficiently once I've mastered it?? Sign me up baby 🤩
…honestly I cannot resist the siren call of Optimisation™. Things could be better! I only need to put in a large amount of effort! 😆
But seriously, I'm giving this a go. I already installed the layout and the training programme, AND did my first lesson (two letters, did not pass). No risk no FUN!
(So if you don't hear from me for another while, it's because I cannot type quickly enough, and/or I got stuck entering my password because I can't do it with the new keyboard layout.)
