Date: Wed, 31 Oct 2001 05:30:07 GMT
Message-Id: <200110310530.f9V5U7a07969@beryl.math.u-psud.fr>
From: sieben@cristal.math.u-psud.fr
To: CyrTeX-en@vsu.ru
Subject: Russian PC Keyboard


Hi all,

This bit should be of general interest.

The PC keyboard seems to be a shotgun marriage  of QUERTY
with some traditional Russian (typewriter?) keyboard;
there is dismayingly little synergy of the two scripts,
given that they are, after all, first cousins. I suspect
much the same is true for essentially all keyboards 
used in Russia. Exceptions anyone?

Here is the (non-?)correspondence between the ASCII and
Cyrillic latters on the PC keyboard.  Since only ASCII
survives email with probabability near 1, I denote 
the 26 ASCII letters by:

             !a !b !c ... !z 

and the 33 letters of the Russian alphabet by:

     a b v g d e 'o 'z z i j k l m n o p r
       s t u f x 't 'c w 'w q y h 'e 'u 'a    

Then the correspondence Cyrillic-Latin given by the letter
keys on Russian PC keyboard is:

1-st row:
 j - !q  't - !w  u - !e  k - !r  e - !t  n - !y 
            g - !u  w - !i  'w - !o  z - !p  x - [  q - ] 
2-d row: 
f - !a  y - !s  v - !d  a - !f  p - !g  r - !h 
            o - !j  l - !k  d - !l  'z - ;   'e - ' 
3-d row: 
'a - !z  'c - !x  s - !c  m - !v  i - !b  t - !n 
             h - !m  b - ,  'u - . 

For example, the first correspondence "j - !q" is between
\cyrishrt and ASCII q on the top left letter key.

The *only* correspondence that has memonic value is
perhaps "s - !c" between Cyrillic \cyrs and ASCII c.
A random corresponce could easily have more of memonic
value! 

Such non-correspondence necessitates the engraving of both
a Cyrillic and a Latin character on each key. Since no
Cyrillic characters are engraved on the keyboards used in
countries with Latin script, my reaction has always been
to fall back on the intrinsic parallelism of the scripts.

It would be interesting to know whether use of this
parallelism on a Latin keyboard is more or less conducive
to a foreigner learning to type Russian Cyrillic than is a
genuine Russian keyboard!

At any rate, Leif has chosen to use the Norwegian and
*not* the Russian keyboard, so a positive answer would be
to his advantage!

Cheers

Laurent S.

PS.  My privately delivered instructions for using *both*
a Russian *and* a Norwegian keyboard for typing a
bilingual document were given mostly in jest.  I think
that option is monumentally clumsy. It was, nevertheless,
so far as I knew the only Macintosh solution that uses
absolutely nothing but standard Mac OS software and
hardware.