Re: [EGD-discu] Swiss Bepo keyboard

["Garreau\, Alexandre" <galex-713@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

I’m answering you in english because you didn’t set an Accept-Language
header in your mail, and along with fellows didn’t find any relevant
personal informations about you (anyway it’s easier to quote and comment
in the same language).

On 2018/11/03 at 18:43, Gilles BRUN-GAUTIER wrote:
> *I'm dreaming of a "European Common Keyboards ("ECKs" doesn't it sound good
> ?) for those, like me, who are keeping on switching between different
> languages of EU : like English, German and French for me.*

Sounds ambitious.  And ambitious ideas call for concrete as well as
substantial basis.  I like revolutionar ideas, that’s a reason I’m
involved in bépo, but you really ought to be more fact-driven and more
cautious with affirmations (think how it is in science), before to talk
about redoing anything as a competing project without any concrete basis
for it.

Did you actually tried recomposing layouts yourself?  Afaik our process
[0] (inspired if not the same as dvorak’s) is open and pretty stable,
and you could replicate it for other corpuses.  You might want to ask
for more informations here, or otherwise (maybe if the liable people are
too busy) try to search for it in the wiki yourself, and also do your
own research as well.

> Moreover, I think that it shouldn't be that difficult as German,
> Danish, Swedish and Norwegian have common roots, just like French,
> Spanish and Italian.

I already thought of that, and that’s an interesting question: how much
a common keyboard for each romance, germanic, or maybe even slavic,
languages could be worth?

That certainly asks for measurements: you could, given a substantial and
stable enough corpus of each language, make a dummy raw optimized
keyboard (without twiddling any further with it), then do the same while
mixing corpus of indo-european languages family (say romance, or
germanic), then for all of european languages (why not? as long it’s
latin), and try to measure how much it would be harder, slower or less
healthy to type with an international keyboard, so to observe if it’s
worth, and if, say, for thrice as much population, you could get a
keyboard less than thrice more painful to use (or less): given network
effect, modulo (unfortunate) low multilingual rate, it could be worth.

But as people (mostly monolingual, at least on a daily basis) are
probably not themselves going right away into it, you’d better first
make measurements, proof, discussions, etc.

> *Last point, Swiss people have created a QWERTZ keyboard *(
> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/QWERTZ) *that make a bridge between French
> and German, andlet me tell you, nowadays, Swiss people won't go for any
> other actual keyboard standard...*

QWERTZ, QWERTY, AZERTY, are all anyway near the same.  They must be, I
guess, all optimal (for a typewritter of course, or anything displaying
similar constraint, such as a T9 keyboard) for english, with minor
twiddling for being more usable in others languages.

But in the end, these minor twiddling show that given a very small,
maybe even minimal, even one letter, is, ergonomically, enough to
completely destroy user experience.  Because they will only
logarithmically adapt to new environment.  So in the end, I observed a
full switch (such as qwerty->dvorak, or azerty->bépo) is way less
painful, and more profitable and productive (related to its costs), than
a really really minimal switch, such as changing one or two letters.

I still today observe way more pain not confusing azerty and qwerty on
various keyboards, than switching from any of these to bépo, or the
other way around, given it’s at least consistent for a long enough
period of time.

I don’t know what do you experience with swiss layout, but I have a hard
time both imagining both this, on a typewritter, is able to fix all
german/french differences to get as usable, and that it worthly ease
switch of users between layouts.  To me it’d look more likely as a
symbolic issue (using one keyboard or another may be understood as a
greater commitment to one or another nation, which is a relevant
symbolic issue), is it?

> *Currently, AFNOR, the french office that define standards, is
> actually working on a standard for France call "Bépo" […]  base on
> Dvorak's keyboard configuration rules ... *But as french people […]
> can't imagine that good ideas could appear somewhere else as France

Sorry but I feel like a contradiction here: dvorak is knowledgeably
usaian.  We didn’t invent anything actually, neither claimed we did so
(while it looks like *you* gave the impression of doing so I feel :/).
We only, indeed, considered to take some initiatives such as EU foreign
languages support and slightly improved handling of English and computer
languages.

Btw, in case you misunderstood, BÉPO —although we got, I guess, a
majority of Frenchmen in our ranks— is not for France, but french,
possibly whole francophony.  It is indeed biased against an EU context,
while may unfortunately be took as a priorisation of european
francophony (which indeed afaik isn’t majoritary), but I read we tried
to have some support for enough latin-based african languages (as
francophony extend there too), English, programming, and Esperanto.

So it should be as well for Belgium, Swiss, etc. only as most of us live
in France, and France’s State has a pretty heavy influence in (locals,)
national and regional economy(/is), we’re happy to see AFNOR standardize
it, as it might pretty help for getting it widespread (especially in a
that much ruled by administration and extensive formalities country)!
If we saw it used and standard in others country we’d find it pretty
cool as well!

> But as french people are selfish and they can't imagine […] somewhere
> else

I don’t know if you’re raising two separate points there or are trying
to make an induction: so I’d first take for the later.  I think what you
are trying to speak about here is not selfishness but egocentrism.
Selfishness sounds pretty natural (and really not specific to bépo) here
to me as not only it seems pretty more natural not to try inventing new
tools you won’t be able to extensively test and use (“dogfeeding” they
call it), for people whose you, of course, know only less the uses,
needs, etc.  Most of francophones I know don’t even know their own
language have 42 letters (including uppercase, ligatures, and up to 21
voyels (twice as much as “official” italian! same number of voyels and
consonents!))!  How would we be sure to do the right thing for others?
to take into account the right decisions?  Many of us first of all made
the improvement for themselves, knowing they might never be widespread
anyway, but nonetheless worth it.  This is a deeply selfish and
excentric as well behavior widely observed in free software movement: it
only calls for collective action and upscaling to become a matter of
sharing and caring (and that’s still as selfish as a selfish gene:
selfish meme).

However, as to egocentrism (bépo is admitedly and purposedly
french-centric), it is interesting to note most initiatives went
national.  This is a pragmatic choice as most countries actively *do*
want to enforce their soft power, as did the USA, France, UK, Germany,
etc. all along, and do so sometimes by maintaining a relative but
sometimes strong linguistic uniformity.  This is especially the case of
France, so it’s even less surprising the context (not to mention
french’s widespreadness) better fits for a french-centered keyboard: a
need is clearly present.  Just as even more so with english (though this
is way more linked to current english supremacy, england and USA being
way less linguistically uniform).

I also know about the Neo initiative [0], for German (whose I recently
reheard about), and, a long time ago, something made up by a single
italian who tried to run the dvorak algorithm for an italian corpus (not
really stable or reliable I guess, but working for him).  The fact it’s
still monolingual and national, just as french bépo and english dvorak,
can also be partially explained by the fact we live in nationalist
paradigms which encourage us to see each nation as different, disjoints,
clearly separated things.  European-wide international
non-economic/liberal initiative are already pretty rare and don’t call
for themselves.

> *Maybe, there's a chance for such a "ECKs" Project to be successfull at
> European Level and thus to open a new product market, where it would be
> good to take the lead.*

Tbh, I believe, just as Ido and may others did for Esperanto, that will
fragment the market and lead it to unstability and unreliability,
eventually leading the initial idea to failure, especially if what
you’re trying to achieve is economical success at a first call.  If a
market ought to be opened, it should be after further standardization of
more levels of keyboards, such as maybe of Neo, maybe of at least one
multilingual optimised layout, and earlier proof of the worthiness of
it.  Maybe a whole european language layout could end useful.  Maybe an
esperanto one could be acceptable.  Currently these are still highly
speculative questions that would ask a lot of testing and discussion (so
that to know what tradeoffs are okay for who).  You should first *make*
and *measure*, and then *propose*.  Meanwhile, it would be way more
reasonable to ask help so to make your attempts and measurements, so
that to answer your questions about how that might be relevant (either
proving it like you wanted, or proving your adversaries once and for all
they were right).

It seems you are trying to promote interlinguism and, at least on
symbolical level, less linguistic hegemony: I strongly believe then, the
most realistic option would be to widespread esperanto and make an
optimized keyboard for it (and use it for all other languages, as anyway
keyboards such as bépo or dvorak are already way more ergonomic for any
language than qwerty or azerty (which may be even worse a totally random
keyboard), and at least that won’t cause any symbolic issues as
esperanto is the language of noone, hence of everyone).  The Grin report
[1] on european context already shown that multilingual initiatives led
to more expensive process, more risk to end in a monolingual supremacy
situation, and were less likely to comply with the initial goal of
avoiding a single’s country linguistic hegemony.  Esperanto is cheaper,
easier, hence more realistic, and is only refused for the same
nationalist reasons multilingual initiatives as you suggest are less
commonly made, worked upon, and even accepted.

Afair we also count quite some esperantist in our project.  The goals
and intents are not that far.

> Plus, there are some good ideas to be looked at, with more ergonomic
> keyboards with "command key" put in center (see http://www.typematrix.com
> or https://www.trulyergonomic.com), by they are seriously ugly.

It’s quite subjective.  You might look at ErgoDox [2] [3] [4], which has
a separated keyboard as well as vertically-shifted keys, afaik most
ergonomic keys layout until now.  Then look might only be a question of
habit.

I’d like to make you note you gave impression of being somewhat rude to
fellows volunteers on the bepo mailing-list, as your message seemed at
first pretty unrelated, and somewhat unconsidering of what work has now
been done here until now.

[0] http://bepo.fr/wiki/Création_de_la_version_0.1
[1] http://www.neo-layout.org/
[2] https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rapport_Grin
[3] http://bepo.fr/wiki/Claviers
[4] http://bepo.fr/wiki/ErgoDox
[5] http://ergodox-ez.com/

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