Fascinating, as Spock would say...:-) I taught for two years in a small town called Haenam, in South Korea, and two years in Japan on Jet program (currently just wandering around Japan :-)), and likewise studied a few languages in university, etc., having always been fascinated by them. (Kanji holds a particular fascination for me, for some unknown reason.) I can communicate well enough, I suppose in three languages, (but of course, language learning is a lifelong process, eh? (eh=famous Canadian emphatic particle :-))
The really scary people are like James Platt (who, unfortunately is no longer with us), on the OED team, who was famously quoted as saying: consulted "linguistic advisers," such as James Platt "who knew scores of languages and once famously declared that the first twelve tongues were always the most difficult, but having mastered them, the following hundred should not pose too much of a problem." Yikes! :-) Quoted from here, by the way, for those interested: http://www.amazon.com/gp/reader/0198607024/ref=sib_dp_pt/105-9251581-0000449#reader-link Anyways, I have placed at the following link, a first attempt at a first draft (?!!), a French translation of a first draft of an English manual of the XO. I'd appreciate corrections, etc., as well as an image of the XO without the English phrases on it. (Yes, I could use the gimp and wipe out and add the French, etc. but it would be easier, more elegant and save time if I could just have the original photo.) Also, I have no idea what is going on with page 10. Suggestions, recommendations, etc. are welcome. http://languageknowledge.googlepages.com/xodocv2-fr5.pdf Ed, you and I are rather similar in our language and keyboard usage. I have studied several languages, and have lived in Korea (Peace Corps) and Japan (Buddhist training). I use Ubuntu with the Gnome keyboard switcher and SCIM. I have worked on documents in English, Chinese, Japanese, and Korean together, and on single-language documents in French, German, Russian, Ukrainian, Armenian, Georgian, Greek, Yiddish, and other languages. Not that I speak all of those languages, but I can type and proofread to some extent, handle character set conversions, and a little of this and that besides. French accents on an English International keyboard are added with the Compose key. So Compose-`-e gives ? Compose-,-c gives ? and so on. The KDE and Gnome keyboard switchers let the user set the Compose key to be right ALT (AltGr), right CTL, either Win key, the Menu key, or Caps Lock. AltGr is the default for the XO, but I use Menu on Ubuntu. I'll add a version of this to the Wiki page on Keyboards. ____________________________________________________________________________________ Never miss a thing. Make Yahoo your home page. http://www.yahoo.com/r/hs _______________________________________________ Devel mailing list [email protected] http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
