h a l f b a k e r yRenovating the wheel
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I have a blank keyboard, and I don't think it would be very practical for our daughter to learn how to type on it. My wife says she'll need to learn her ABCs first. Then it hit me. The order of the alphabet should be changed to reflect the order the letters appear on a QWERTY keyboard. There will be
a long transition period, like the nebulous transition period of the United States switching to a measurement system that isn't complete garbage, but I still say it's a worthwhile goal.
Dvorak Simplified Keyboard
http://en.wikipedia...Simplified_Keyboard
Is this sort of what you were thinking of? [popbottle, Mar 03 2014]
Autocorrect Aware Keyboard Layout
[ytk, Mar 03 2014]
One of many articles on subject
http://mentalfloss....e-letters-abc-order
[theircompetitor, Mar 03 2014]
DIY PC Stenography
http://plover.stenoknight.com/
To try this out one needs to destroy a gaming keyboard, I seem to recall. It's a waste of time trying it on the rubbish keyboards most of us use. [skoomphemph, Mar 04 2014]
library of congress as data unit
http://blogs.loc.go...-how-you-define-it/
[theircompetitor, Mar 05 2014]
Phonetic Order
Phonetic_20Alphabetical_20Order
[JesusHChrist, Mar 06 2014]
[link]
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Noooooo!!! This would just solidify the position of the
shitsack that is the QWERTY layout, and end any hope
humanity ever has of switching to a keyboard layout that
isn't complete garbage. |
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Also, the alphabet song wouldn't rhyme anymore. |
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Also, it would no longer be called the alphabet. |
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Or as those in the know call it, the bull house list. |
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Nobody learns on a blank keyboard. |
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Put all the vowels together? |
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Put similar sounds together? |
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or b d and q p and s z and other mirror images? |
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They sell keyboards that are laid out for speed.
The Dvorak Simplified Keyboard is one such. I used to own and use one, but it was a very fish out of water experience. |
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They sell keyboards that you can customize any order you want. ( the key caps snap off and on ) and map of the letter assigned to any key can be changed to what is wanted. |
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The qwerty board was originally designed to slow typists down so the mechanical parts would not get all jammed together. |
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Off topic - Have you read "The Kalahari Typing School for Men" (No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency, Book 4) [Alexander McCall Smith] Good series! |
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//a very fish out of water experience. |
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For a fish with hydrophobia it would be a pleasant but brief experience. |
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I used the Dvorak layout for several years. I even bought a special
keyboard that you could reprogram (this was in the days before it was
easy to switch keyboard layouts in software). |
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I can't honestly say it made me a faster typist, but I dunno, I just
sorta… preferred it. On the other hand, I was a teenager at the time,
and maybe I was just sort of being contrarian for the sake of doing so.
Eventually I stopped using it, mostly because it became too much of a
pain to reprogram games and other applications that used keystroke
shortcuts. Also, because cut/copy/paste were no longer conveniently
grouped together on the lower left of the keyboard. Reluctantly, I
abandoned my teenage rebellion, and gave in to the pressure to
conform. |
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Still, I really hate the QWERTY layout, and I would be more than
pleased if everyone switched to something better. I don't know if the
stories of QWERTY being used to slow down typists are true or not,
but there are things about it that really irk me. It's utterly wasteful to have a punctuation key—and a rarely used one at
that—on the home row underneath a finger. Letters that are common substitutes for each other are grouped too closely
together. I just don't believe that the most efficient layout could have been designed over 100 years ago. |
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I'm typing this in Dvorak right now, for old times' sake. I'm probably
typing at about 10% of my normal typing speed. If I really wanted to, I
could get up to speed in a day or two. Not really worth the hassle,
unfortunately. |
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//The qwerty board was originally designed to
slow typists down// |
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Actually, that's a popular myth. The QWERTY
keyboard was designed to allow _faster_ typing. |
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By putting often-consecutive letters far apart, the
typist could type them in rapid succession with
less likelihood of their jamming, because (being
far apart) one key could be rising towards the
paper as the other one was on its way down. |
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That strikes (heh) me not so much as being a myth per se,
as a slight misinterpretation. The problem wasn't that the
typists were typing too quickly, but that adjacent keys
were getting jammed. But since the perceived problem was
that “people are typing too fast” and the solution fixed the
problem, it was simplified in the public mind as “it made
people type slower”. |
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Of course, the oft-overlooked fact is that, regardless of
which version of the story is closest to the truth, the
QWERTY layout was designed to solve a problem common
to mechanical typewriters of the 19th century. Shirley we
who are no longer constrained by such limitations are
capable of designing a better keyboard layout. I humbly
submit my own proposal for a strategy to design a better
keyboard (link). |
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This is almost a "let's all" idea. It's actually amazing
that I ever learned to type, but now that I have, I
really don't want to Re-Learn! Somehow QWERTY is
OK with me. |
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//The order of the alphabet should be changed to reflect the order the letters appear on a QWERTY keyboard// |
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Other key layouts notwithstanding, even the maligned QWERTY keyboard has various key orders. Which order are you talking about? |
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Rows starting from top: QWERTY... |
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Rows starting from home row: ASDFG... |
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Columns starting from left: QAZWSX... |
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The next question is why. |
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The fact that the alphabet is essentially an arbitrary
order is something I'd never thought about. It
actually made my mind wobble a little. |
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The fact that the alphabet is essentially an arbitrary
order is something I'd never thought about. It
actually made my mind wobble a little. |
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it is by no means arbitrary. |
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I'm with [xan]; I can type quickly on a QWERTY and I'm
nearing the point in a man's life when he is no longer
interested in changing things that work just fine. You young
turks can mess with your key layouts all you want, but right
at the moment consumer computers are still made by and
mostly for people who grew up with QWERTY. |
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Additionally, I think we're poised to make some incredible
breakthroughs in the field of computer science; pausing to
re-design the interface hardware for no good reason would
be like suddenly devoting all the world's high-level
pharmaceutical research to developing a slightly better
antacid. |
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//it is by no means arbitrary.// |
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//I think we're poised to make some incredible
breakthroughs in the field of computer science// |
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Thanks for that, I needed a laugh. |
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//it is by no means arbitrary.//
The QWERTY layout, or ABCDE...?
As far as I can tell, the ABCDE... order has no correlation with anything, other than it's vague evolution from Latin/Greek/etc. I've often thought "there must be a better way" but I could never bother trying to figure one out (besides QWERTY, which, as others have said, is not the best keyboard layout either). Perhaps some ordering that has some relationship with the English language; vowels first or something? Or perhaps ETAOINS... (letter frequency in English order)? |
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See link, Ray (and feel free to search as well). As I
alluded to in an earlier anno, the bull house list. |
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My preference is for the evolution of common
hieroglyphs hypothesis, as far as the original
alphabet is concerned. Aleph (the Hebrew and
really, Phoenician first letter) is also an ox or bull,
going in all likelehood to the sacred Apis bull. Beit
means house, or home. Gimel a type of weapon.
Dalet (or delta) is door. Hei is window. Etc, etc. |
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My completely uneducated guess would be that
when the Phoenicians invented the notion of
symbolic representations of sounds rather than
pictorial representation of words, they then used
existing hieroglyphs as mnemonic devices and
went by the importance of such glyphs in common
usage. One could also debate whether they were
trying to codify the earliest sounds a child makes,
and so the "AAAH" and "BAAA" sounds had to be
codified first. |
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At least some of the letters were also used to
count inventory, by traders, perhaps even earlier
than they were used to write words. So it is
possible this influenced the order. |
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Clearly it is hard to know for sure -- but since they
were putting together a codified list, I'm fairly
certain they had a scheme for it. |
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Later adopters (e.g. Greeks and Romans) probably
used more rational analysis, had to add language
specific sounds as well, and more importantly,
codify vowels properly. |
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Or we could just completely re-spell every word in
the English language so that the probability and
sequence of letters and the sequence favors a
qwerty layout. |
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The French (yes, them) revised the alphabet in
1794,
much as they revised the calendar. |
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The letters were given names, and the revised
alphabet started with "RBEF..." (Republique,
Bastille,
Egalité, France...). All alphabetical systems were
required to be re-ordered to fit the new system. |
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They also abolished the letter "L" (for Louis),
replacing it with either "I" or "N" in a major
spelling reform. |
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Ahh, you've all got it all wrong. If we developed a frequency table keyboard (ETAONRS...) we could develop mighty muscles on some fingers and others could waste away. |
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When it comes to typing, some people are out to bypass the alphabet entirely. <link> |
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I've done no more than read about Plover, but do use a one-handed keyer called the Twiddler. Typing is done in chords, so eg. to type "ing", I just hit the middle lower 2 buttons at once. |
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I'm still terribly slow, and get sore joints if I use it too much. Also it's jamming and giving extra spaces (and extra backspaces, which is annoying). In principle the chord idea still makes sense to me, but in practice it would probably be wiser to just disable the touchpad, and type on the laptop. |
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So I would say, yes, rearrange the alphabet - into chunks. A chunk like the entire word "different" turns out not to be that useful, but the letter "ent" is p-re-t-t-y h-and-y. |
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If I wrote something in C, && is a l-it-l-e b-it useful; and "" (with a cursor that goes back in-side, and w-a-it-s f-or you the-re) is always nice to have. It takes some remembering, but one just makes the alter-at-ion-s slowly. |
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Are we so narrow-minded that we think the English
Alphabet is the only alphabet in the world? Wait
until we are typing hieroglyphs! |
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//Wait until we are typing hieroglyphs!// We tried
those a couple of millennia go. For some reason
they never caught on. (Or, as they would have said
back in the day: 'duck sun wiggly-lines vase. Wolf sun
palm-tree palm-tree.') |
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Never caught on? I would think it's at least
competitive in terms of length of time used by
species, and given iconography, emoticons and the
trends in ui design and info management, I think
pictures continue to say a thousand words |
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//pictures continue to say a thousand words// |
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Draw "doubtfullness" for me. |
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//terms of length of time used by species// |
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I would argue that "data recorded" is the most
valuable criteria, and the Roman alphabet is the
winner, by far, under that criteria. |
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One could even probably successfully argue that
English is the current winner in that regard, although
modern translation capabilities make that uncertain. |
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Well in words (cut me a bit of slack now), I could say as much as any picture does (in terms of precision, rather than volume, here) with the word, "?" |
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OK. "Huh?", then. It paints a picture; which, in turn, says 1000 words. (We don't have italics to suggest the tone with which the "huh?" is said.) |
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This annotation of mine is quite satisfyingly self-contradictory. So much more interesting than getting it right. |
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Part 2 (aside). I hear that the quick way to type in Chinese is to use a romanisation like Pinyin together with software that figures out what characters match the "sound". Heiroglyphics would be subject to the same forces, so you can be sure that already at some museums there are Egyptologists who surreptitiously romanise. |
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//I would argue that "data recorded" is the most
valuable criteria// criterion. |
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(/ ? \):(
This is my *drawing* of doubtfullness. |
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////I would argue that "data recorded" is the most
valuable criteria// criterion.// |
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Ha. I was trying to draw corrections, therefore
increasing the relative value of English. |
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Data recorded? You want to compete with
YouTube? Digital pictures uploaded? You would be
way off, it's not even a contest |
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The trouble with images is which of those thousand
words were you exactly trying to convey? |
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[tc], yes, I'm aware of the Phoenecian linkage, but I
didn't know that they had any method to their order
other than arbitrary. But your connection to the
first sounds of toddlers does make a bit of sense. |
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Surely the best answer is some of kind thin-flim keys for the keyboard and then at the touch of a button, the keys can display any letter system you like... |
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Comes with a moving the ' about at random intervals function, for a laugh. |
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PS Ok I typed thin-flim by mistake, but decided I prefer it. |
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An ogam keyboard might work nicely, it would be a 5x5 grid of keys, would fit nicely under the hands. |
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