It's interesting to see what kind of ideas some people develop who call their own country "kafir", but there's nothing new in the proposed approach, and Arabic keyboards of this type have been around for quite a while.
If I remember correctly, Tim Buckwalter was one of the first linguists to introduce a Latinized Arabic keyboard layout for output of both vernacular and transliterated Arabic, in the late 1980's. This keyboard was very useful especially for lexicographic projects. It's being used, for example, by Buckwalter's Arabic morphoplogical analyzer, www.ldc.upenn.edu/Catalog/CatalogEntry.jsp?catalogId=LDC2002L49. (BTW, is there a Persian counterpart?) What may make more sense these days is a keyboard that supports all the glyphs of the Extended Arabic codeset, from Maghrebian to Uyghur or Malay, and since many of the people concerned have been subject to one or several script "reforms" in a not too distant past, or are at least used to English or Russian as commercial (and computing) languages, it would probably be best to start this approach on the basis of a standard US or Cyrillic keyboard. I've made an alternative approach and tried to discuss with people in Pakistan and Afghanistan the usefulness of adapting the Iranian standard keyboard layout to their languages (as at least in case of Dari, the advantages would be clear) but received mostly negative comments. This topic may go beyond the scope of this forum (moderator?), so if forum members are interested in further discussion, please contact me offlist. Best regards, Peter E. Hauer Linguasoft Vienna, Austria -----Original Message----- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Behdad Esfahbod Sent: Monday, January 12, 2004 8:25 AM To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: A piece of history I just found this mail in my archives. Connie, you may be interested. (note the date) behdad ---------- Forwarded message ---------- Date: Mon, 19 Feb 2001 06:15:12 From: Linas Kondratas <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Subject: Arabic/Persian keybord driver Dear brother?/sister? XXXXXXX XXXXXXX As-salamu alaykum, I would be thankful if you could provide me some informations concerning the possibility to write a special keybord driver for Arabic and Persian. The problem is the following: I am living in a Kafir country(Lithuania) which uses the Latin alphabet. I am therefore very used to Latin letters, excellently know their places etc. Arabic and Persian however have different keybord layouts, and Persian "peh" is in different place than Latin "p". It is not so much difficult thing for a Persian or Arab, since they learn their own layout first so to say with the milk of mother :-) and only then learn to use the Latin layout(if they need it at all), but for me it is a big difficulty. http://www.langbox.com/AraZilla/#screen For example using the layout provided by this site, one has Dad in the place of q, Sad in the place of w, theh in the place of e and so on; the word khudA for example has to be typed as i]h !!! instead of xd\. I get an idea that it would be a good thing to write a keybord driver to enter using Latin letters without any need to have to remember places for Arabic and Persian letters and/or to paint the letters on the keys. Here is a table showing the keys or combination of keys which would be needed to type an Arabo-Persian letter: ALEF WITH MADDA \\ ALEF \ HAMZA ' BEH b PEH p TEH t THEH th teh + heh t-h JEEM j TCHEH ch HAH H KHAH x DAL d THAL dh REH r ZAIN z JEH zh zain+heh z-h SEEN s SHEEN sh seen+heh s-h SAD S DAD D TAH T ZAH Z AIN 3 GHAIN gh FEH f QAF q KEHEH k GAF g LAM l MEEM m NOON n WAW w HEH h FARSI YEH y FATHA a KASRA e DAMMA o FATHATAN aa KASRATAN ee DAMMATAN oo ARABIC SHADDA W ARABIC SUKUN O ALEF WITH HAMZA ABOVE \' WAW WITH HAMZA ABOVE w' ALEF WITH HAMZA BELOW \" YEH WITH HAMZA ABOVE i' TEH MARBUTA a; ARABIC LETTER KAF K ARABIC LETTER YEH i WASLA(if such symbol exists) S I hope you will get the idea. I will give some an example how the first line of the Fatiha would be entered by using my system: without vocalization \lHmd llh rb \l3\lmyn with full vocalization \alOHamOdo lelWhe rabWe \SlO3a\lameyna A line from Hafiz \gr \yn trk shr\zy bdst \\rd dl mr\ It doesn't mean that I would have to prepare a text using such transcription then decode it by a special program, no. Would I would need it is that Arabic persian text using Arabic or Persian text redactor appears as I am typing the letters. Now the question - maybe you have a source code for an ordinary keybord driver, so that using it I could produce my own special keybord driver. I am going to use the Linux system on my computer. Another question: It is necessary to write a separate keybord driver for every encoding, as eg. ISIRI 3342, ISIRI 2900, IRAN SYSTEM, ISO 8859-6, MS Arabic, Unicode or it is enough to have one for all? Khuda Hafez(xd\ H\fZ), Abdurrahman Linas Kondratas _________________________________________________________________________ Get Your Private, Free E-mail from MSN Hotmail at http://www.hotmail.com. _______________________________________________ PersianComputing mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://lists.sharif.edu/mailman/listinfo/persiancomputing _______________________________________________ PersianComputing mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://lists.sharif.edu/mailman/listinfo/persiancomputing
