Good name for a multilingual keyboard layout?

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Deinonysus
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Good name for a multilingual keyboard layout?

Postby Deinonysus » Thu Nov 11, 2021 7:35 pm

I have a custom multilingual keyboard layout I created about a year and a half ago, and I've been using it ever since. I've gotten it almost up to my QWERTY speed in English (70wpm) but I'm hoping to get over 100wpm in English, French, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, and Turkish as a proof of concept and then maybe publish it online.

It consists of three main layers:
  1. The Main Layer (the plain Latin alphabet), which can by typed without any modifier keys. It is optimized for English, Spanish, French, and German using a brute-force algorithm using letter frequency data from practicalcryptography.com. The letters are assigned into groups based on the Workman Layout key ratings, with the most frequent letters going on the best keys. The algorithm looks at each group and checks every possible permutation of letters to find the best score to avoid same-finger bigrams, outward rolls, and certain uncomfortable double-row jumps. The results is comparable to Colemak and Dvorak in terms of same-finger bigrams (a bit worse than both but much better than QWERTY), although it has a lot more satisfying inward rolls than Colemak does, and it provided me with a more enjoyable typing experience than another layout I came up with that beats Colemak and Dvorak in most stats but has a lot of outward rolls.
  2. The Special Character Layer (which is accessed by pressing the Alt-Gr (right alt) key or the Ctrl+Alt keys and pressing a letter key). This layer is not machine optimized, but many letters go along with related letters (so for example, c maps to ç, k maps to ƙ, g maps to ğ, and n maps to ñ); otherwise, I tried to put the most frequent letters into the best spots and avoid any obnoxious same finger bigrams on different keys.
  3. The Deadkey Layer (which accessed by pressing Alt-Gr keys or Ctrl+Alt keys followed by a number or punctuation key which activates the deadkey, and then finally another key is pressed to create the desired character. Many deadkeys can be chained together. It requires more keystrokes to use this layer than the Special Character Layer, but the Deadkey Layer provides support for almost any conceivable Latin-script language, as well as most IPA symbols (although I'm still working on full IPA support and I'm not sure if it's completely feasable). Most deadkeys will generate a combining diacritic mark when you press the space bar, which allows you to type languages that do not have full Unicode support (such as Navajo and accented Yoruba)
The Special Character layer provides fast typing for all of the top 40 most spoken languages (by total number of speakers) that use the Latin alphabet, with a few exceptions:
  • The Vietnamese alphabet is too complex to be well served by a multilingual keyboard layout and would do better with its own dedicated layout. However, it can be typed on this layout with the deadkeys.
  • There are a few low-frequency letters in the French alphabet (ë, ï, ÿ, and æ) that do not appear on the Special Character layer and must be typed using deadkeys. This does not noticeably impact the typing experience in French.
  • The Spanish punctuation keys ¿ and ¡ can be typed on the extra key that appears on the ISO layout, and the º and ᵃ ordinal indicators that are used in Spanish and Portuguese can be typed using key using the Special Character Layer. However, an ANSI keyboard (the most common format in the US) is missing this key, so on these keyboards the deadkey layer must be used.
  • The Yoruba language has three tones: do, re, and mi (low, mid, and high). It may be written with or without tone marks (a grave accent for do, an acute accent for mi, and the occasional macron for re if there's any ambiguity); for example, BBC Yoruba uses tone marks in headlines but not in the main articles. Accentless Yoruba can be typed using only the Main and Special Character layers, but deadkeys are required to type accents on the letters ẹ, ọ, and n; sadly, there are no Unicode symbols for ẹ and ọ with accent marks, so a combining diacritic mark must be added with a deadkey. Some prefer a vertical line instead of a dot below because this is visible even when a word is underlined; this symbol may be added to a letter using a deadkey.
With these caveats in mind, here are the languages that can be quickly typed using only the Main and Special Character Layers:
  1. English (1.348 billion speakers)
  2. Spanish (543 million)
  3. French (267 million)
  4. Portuguese (258 million)
  5. Indonesian (excl. Malay) (199 million)
  6. Standard German (135 million)
  7. Turkish (88 million)
  8. Hausa (75 million)
  9. Swahili (69 million)
  10. Javanese (68 million)
  11. Italian (68 million)
  12. Nigerian Pidgin (48 million)
  13. Filipino (excl. Tagalog) (45 million)
  14. Yoruba (43 million)
Other than Vietnamese and accented Yoruba, the most widely spoken Latin-script language that cannot by typed without heavy use of deadkeys is Polish, the 43rd most spoken language in the world with 41 million speakers.

I'm pretty please with and excited about this layout, but sadly I don't have a very good name for it. I originally called it the QUFLXÜ layout but then I didn't want to have to keep changing the name every time I moved the keys around (which I have done several times) so I called it the Deinonysus Multilingual Layout, or DeinonML for short. But the problem is that I don't think that's very memorable and people would be confused about the spelling and pronunciation. I'd like something punchy and memorable that references its multilingual nature. Since we're all language lovers here, I'm wondering if you guys might be able to help me out with a good name.

Any suggestions?
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Re: Good name for a multilingual keyboard layout?

Postby Deinonysus » Thu Nov 11, 2021 11:38 pm

I did think of one potential name: Dubsar, which the Sumerian word for scribe. It is composed of the characters dub (meaning tablet) and sar (meaning write).

Here is what the characters look like:
dubsar.png

One concern is that English speakers would pronounce the "U" as "uh" instead of "ooh", thus rendering the name a bit too close to "dubstep". Although it would be aimed at an international audience and I think this name could be pronounced reasonably accurately by speakers of most languages.
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Re: Good name for a multilingual keyboard layout?

Postby Iversen » Fri Nov 12, 2021 12:23 am

I don't study Vietnamese, but couldn't you devise a system that added the diacritics by pressing a number key together with a Latin letter? Maybe such a system could also be used for Koiné Greek and other languages with alphabets burdened by excessive use of diacritics - the main criterion would be that there aren't more than 10 different diacritics.
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Re: Good name for a multilingual keyboard layout?

Postby SiejLind » Fri Nov 12, 2021 1:11 am

Why not just use that initial idea you have? It really looks awesome already and something catchy and personal for you. I think if I had this kind of tool though, I'll probably relate it with stars or space since I'm into that.

I think this keyboard layout you have is awesome though. Probably, stick to a super general name since you mentioned that you change your layout often.

I'd name my keyboard "Orrery" since it's related to space and another hobby I'm into ;)
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Re: Good name for a multilingual keyboard layout?

Postby Deinonysus » Fri Nov 12, 2021 2:40 am

Iversen wrote:I don't study Vietnamese, but couldn't you devise a system that added the diacritics by pressing a number key together with a Latin letter? Maybe such a system could also be used for Koiné Greek and other languages with alphabets burdened by excessive use of diacritics - the main criterion would be that there aren't more than 10 different diacritics.

Well in fact that isn't too far off from how my layout handles Vietnamese. The deadkey for a dot below a letter is AltGr+Shift+2, and the deadkey for a horn is AltGr+Shift+4, and then you press o or u to get ợ and ự. But that is 7 keystrokes to get one letter which is very inefficient. A proper Vietnamese layout should be able to type any lowercase letter (including tone mark) with two keystrokes, but this unfortunately takes up too much real estate on a keyboard to be doable on a multilingual layout.

I actually have made what I think is a pretty good Vietnamese keyboard layout. It had all 12 vowel letters on the right side, a deadkey for each of the five tone marks on the QWERT keys, and a bunch of letters that are not commonly used in Vietnamese were pushed up to the numbers row. I think concessions like these are required for a good Vietnamese layout, which means that a good Vietnamese layout will be terrible for other languages.

Incidentally, chained deadkeys are a game changer for Polytonic Greek. For the default Polytonic Greek layout on Windows, you have to memorize a different key for each combination of diacritic marks, but if you can just press, say, one key for rough breathing, a second key for a circumflex accent, and a third key for a subscript iota, that's a lot easier than remembering exactly where the rough+circumflex+subscript-iota key is, which you'll forget unless you type on the layout every day.

SiejLind wrote:Why not just use that initial idea you have? It really looks awesome already and something catchy and personal for you. I think if I had this kind of tool though, I'll probably relate it with stars or space since I'm into that.

I think this keyboard layout you have is awesome though. Probably, stick to a super general name since you mentioned that you change your layout often.

I'd name my keyboard "Orrery" since it's related to space and another hobby I'm into ;)

Thanks! Which idea do you mean, is it "Dubsar"?

I think space is cool but I'm not familiar with "Orrery", what does that mean?
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Re: Good name for a multilingual keyboard layout?

Postby SiejLind » Sun Nov 14, 2021 11:04 pm

Deinonysus wrote: Thanks! Which idea do you mean, is it "Dubsar"?

I think space is cool but I'm not familiar with "Orrery", what does that mean?


Yeah, Dubsar. It actually sounds cool to me. Orrery is the mechanical model of the Solar system that predicts the motion of the planets which is heliocentric. It looks like this:

https://i.ytimg.com/vi/Aj47IJW_DRA/maxresdefault.jpg

PS: I don't wanna use the bbcode since it's not working to scale. :(
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Re: Good name for a multilingual keyboard layout?

Postby rdearman » Mon Nov 15, 2021 11:34 am

MKL - multilingual keyboard layout?
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Re: Good name for a multilingual keyboard layout?

Postby Deinonysus » Mon Nov 15, 2021 5:34 pm

rdearman wrote:MKL - multilingual keyboard layout?

That is unfortunately such a good suggestion that there are already a couple of layouts out there with variations of that name.
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Re: Good name for a multilingual keyboard layout?

Postby rdearman » Mon Nov 15, 2021 6:59 pm

Deinonysus wrote:
rdearman wrote:MKL - multilingual keyboard layout?

That is unfortunately such a good suggestion that there are already a couple of layouts out there with variations of that name.

MarKeL ?
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