France Says AZERTY Keyboards Fail French Typists (arstechnica.com) 315
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.
Zimply yooz Qwerty (Score:5, Funny)
I 'av ner problem typing zee french on zis keyberd layoot!
Re: Zimply yooz Qwerty (Score:5, Funny)
Wrong. Clearly you have your keyboard misconfigured in dvorak mode.
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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 (Score:5, Interesting)
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... [straightdope.com]
Re: Zimply yooz Qwerty (Score:5, Interesting)
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 [straightdope.com]...
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 (Score:5, Funny)
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.
Just use whatever the Germans do (Score:5, Funny)
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.
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Re: Just use whatever the Germans do (Score:5, Funny)
Hmm, they come out as gibberish on Slashdot.
So do most of the articles, and many of the comments :-)
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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 . . .
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I think it might work better if you send the German keyboard by way of Belgium and Luxembourg.
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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
Re:Just use whatever the Germans do (Score:5, Informative)
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.
QWERTZ auch (Score:3)
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.
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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.
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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
Re:QWERTZ auch (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
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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.
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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
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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
The US intl variant is nice for having combos like AltGr+q for ä rather than separate accent/compose keys.
It's ok.. (Score:5, Insightful)
...QWERTY has been failing English typists for over a century!
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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.
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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 fas
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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 [wikipedia.org]. 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 f
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Yes, but by design.
Canadian-French multilingual keyboard (Score:5, Interesting)
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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.
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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 ne
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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.
Status: WONTFIX (Score:2, Funny)
"Often, an accent is the only distinguishing factor between two similarly spelled words."
Sounds like a problem with the language, not the keyboard. WONTFIX
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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 pr
Why is this just coming up now? (Score:2)
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The choice probably had more to do with not having an English key layout rather than it actually being useful to French typists.
The AZERTY layout was hammered out for some reason (Score:2)
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Makes me appreciate the English alphabet (Score:2)
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
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Right, /. doesn't like Unicode. The missing character in quotes looks like an 'o' and 'e' smashed together.
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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.
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The English alphabet sucks (Score:2)
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
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It's not so much the letters (Score:2)
The punctuation is a real bastard. I find it really hard to do < > since they're on the same key.
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A relic from the past (Score:5, Interesting)
Obvious joke (Score:2)
"The keyboard won't type French Letters"
Bot the French are Catholics so that shouldn't be a problem.
all modern, latin keyboards suck (Score:2)
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 [wikipedia.org] from the 1970s. After t
Accidents of history (Score:4, Informative)
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.
So someone has finally noticed... (Score:2)
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 no
What?? (Score:2)
Only terrorists use accented letters.
Use the regular, gawd-fearin' ENGLISH letters, the way gawd intended 'em to be used, ya gawdless savages!
QWERTY was designed to be inefficient (Score:2)
Part of the solution is... (Score:2)
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 [vulpeculox.net]
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 t
Canadian Bilingual KB (Score:2)
Re:The more you tighten your grip... (Score:5, Insightful)
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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 o
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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.
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I don't really care about French keyboards. I do hav
Re: The more you tighten your grip... (Score:3, Insightful)
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.
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I suggest using CAPS LOCK for the typing of all-caps sentences with accented bits.
Re: The more you tighten your grip... (Score:2)
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... (Score:2)
"Or maybe their government couldæ"
Really? Slashdot still doesn't support Unicode?
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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... (Score:5, Insightful)
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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.
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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... (Score:5, Informative)
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. [inria.fr]
Re:The more you tighten your grip... (Score:4, Interesting)
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"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".
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The circumflex is a modifier key on AZERTY, that makes it reasonably easy to type.
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It depends on which kind of present tense (i.e. which meaning you're trying to convey). English has more than one.
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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
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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... (Score:5, Funny)
You looser ....
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Very punny.
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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 cons
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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.
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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 ha
Re: (Score:2)
karma (Score:2)
Re: (Score:3)
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 t