[B-Greek] Greek National Keyboard (was . . .)
Randall Buth
randallbuth at gmail.com
Sun Apr 17 12:55:15 EDT 2011
Schwandt egrapse
>> and risk moving away from the Greek national keyboard layout.
kai egrapse
>Still, I suppose that one could argue that at least one of the languages
allows for faster typing, which is better than neither in the Qwerty
layout. But that creates some culturally negative implications on the
Greek side of things. (If you have read anything on postcolonialism, you
will understand what I'm pointing to.)>
>
>I guess I'm left still thinking that a Greek Dvorak keyboard at best doesn't
fulfill the goals of Dvorak layouts and at worst elevates and
institutionalizes English typing while continuing to cripple Greek typing.
I'm not against an easier Greek layout, but that certainly would not be a
phonetic version of Dvorak.>
>
>Thanks for the opportunity to think and discuss this issue.
>Blessings,
>John Schwandt
Thank you John, for raising both the practical issues and the cultural
and esthetic issues.
As I've stated many a time, one of the problems for persons learning
ancient Greek is that they are given many implicit and explicit signals
that detach the dialect of Greek language that they are studying from
the rest of the language and from common sense of what might be
expected of human languages. The keyboard is one of those signals.
The Greek national keyboard underlines the connection of one Greek
dialect with others. An English-based keyboard implicitly tells
the Greek student that what they are learning is not connected with
the rest of the language,--that they can think about Greek in
isolation from how they might think about other languages.
And I think that you are correct that is sends
"culturally negative implications".
And Unnecessarily.
It may take a little extra time to learn the positions of the
diacritic strokes in Windows, but there are unifying principles.
The 'shift' key generally provides the same two-diacritic mark as
the unshifted key, but with rough breathing. And the right-alt
key presents any diacritic key as the same plus iota subjcript.
So I touchtype both Windows and Mac. Not a problem. It's one
of the joys of entering the 'new world' of a language and its
culture.
And at the end of the day, it's Greek.
ERRWSO
IWANHS
--
Randall Buth, PhD
www.biblicallanguagecenter.com
Biblical Language Center
Learn Easily - Progress Further - Remember for Life
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