Verdurian Keyboard Layout

[Freff Gaazel]

Emai fsya,

As I work my way through the Practical Course in Verdurian, I was looking for a way to type in the Verdurian alphabet, but couldn't figure out how to input the letters using the font on my Mac. Bostenece, SIL has a free software called Ukelele that lets you create keyboard layouts. I wanted to share the one I made, which you can download here. You'll need the font and Ukelele software to install. I've attached a quick key below based on a MacOS qwerty layout.

Zurai bosa fsyan cum visanoin muë!

[zompist]

Good work! But if you have a Mac I don't know why you needed this. The á ä î accents should work normally (option-e a, etc.). The carons should be simple too, e.g. option-s for š, shift-option-s for Š.

There are a few oddities due to the way Macs set up the keyboard: Ď is option-f, and ž is #.

I need to update the font on that page; this one is better.

[Freff Gaazel]

Dëkuy! The Verdurian letters weren't mapped to their Latin equivalents in the old version of the font, which was causing my problem. The new one works perfectly.

[Emily]

i thought this would be about keyboard layouts in verduria!

would the verdurian computer keyboard follow the general layout of the verdurian typewriter? and if so, what would the verdurian typewriter layout be? the modern english-language keyboard layout has its roots in preventing typebars in early typewriter models from jamming, and the layout remained long after those technical problems were solved. would something similar happen on almea? or is the technology different? (there were quite a number of unusual early designs for typewriters on earth before the design became relatively standardized). just curious is all, i like thinking about keyboard layouts lol

[dewrad]

Assuming that early Verdurian typewriters shared the same limitations of their Terrestrial equivalents, I would guess that keyboard design would try to strike a balance between user-friendliness, having the most frequent letters the easiest to access; and functionality, keeping those letters commonly used consecutively on opposite sides of the keyboard to reduce the likelihood of a jam.

So, thinking about it: the Verdurian alphabet has 27 letters. Let's assume that uestu hands work like human ones, and extension is a more comfortable movement for fingers than flexion: this suggests that an optimal layout will have three rows, with the top row containing the most letters. 10-9-8 should work well.

Using the Verdurian version of Effect/Countereffect as a corpus, let's look at frequencies (ignoring the distinction between vowels with and without a vuáë for the moment - unlike the lenge, this doesn't distinguish phonemes). Interestingly, ë is far more frequent than either ü, ä or ö (which are the least frequent in the corpus, along with h), which would argue for it having its own key, but against ü, ä or ö having theirs

In Terrestrial keyboards, the most frequent letters are found towards the middle and the top of the keyboard. The twelve most frequent letters in Verdurian are e a i n o r u s l m t c (in that order), so let's put them in the centre of the top and middle rows:

?	E	A	I	N	O	R	U	S	?
?	?	?	L	M	T	C	?	?
?	?	?	?	?	?	?	?	?

Now to fill in around the sides, with frequency decreasing the further towards the periphery we go. Assuming that most uesti are right handed, the right side of the bottom row would be the most accessible after the centre of the other two rows (that's why QWERTY has NM and the most common punctuation where it does) - so the next most frequent letters d and š can go there:

Y	E	A	I	N	O	R	U	S	K
Č	Z	P	L	M	T	C	Ë	V
Ď	H	Ř	F	B	Ž	D	Š	G

Let's take the twenty-two most common bigrams in the sample: an ne re so er le el ra om ce ro et es sa ur la pr ei li ec ta řo. The first thing this suggests to me is that n should be further away from e and a that it is. Let's swap it with s:

Y	E	A	I	S	O	R	U	N	K
Č	Z	P	L	M	T	C	Ë	V
Ď	H	Ř	F	B	Ž	D	Š	G

Turns out this is not as useful as one might have expected, because it puts s and o next to each other, and this is a very common bigram. So let's swap s and c:

Y	E	A	I	C	O	R	U	N	K
Č	Z	P	L	M	T	S	Ë	V
Ď	H	Ř	F	B	Ž	D	Š	G

What about the diacritics (except for ë)? Let's assume that they'll be deadkeys. If we take ë out of the equation, by far the most common diacritic is the vuáë - let's stick it on the home row, to the right so it's easily accessible. So that a typist doesn't hit the lenge key by mistake when they actually want a vuáë, let's put the lenge on the opposite side of the board, on the bottom row:

Y	E	A	I	C	O	R	U	N	K
Č	Z	P	L	M	T	S	Ë	V	◌́
◌̈	Ď	H	Ř	F	B	Ž	D	Š	G

Just my suggestion of what an keyboard might look like in Verduria.

h/t cedh for the Frequentizer, which made this quick and easy. BTW, in the Verdurian version of Subrel i aksubrel, what should be Á is actually å.

[zompist]

That's awesome!

I'm tempted to just use it, but I have one quibble. Shouldn't the most frequent keys be on the home row? Is there any reason we can't swap the top two rows?

For punctuation we have (the equivalents of) . , ? ! < > + - x ÷ = ord frac exp. And the digits 0-9. I'd like a Á key as well.

As it happens the typewriter was invented by flaids. Flaidish needs three more letters, and I think the idea of "three more letters" would be part of the standard layout, but used differently in different countries. In Verduria they could be used for the three extra letters needed for Cadhinor. If I'm not mistaken Kebreni would get by with three extra too. (Ismain no.)

[dewrad]

That's awesome!

I'm tempted to just use it, but I have one quibble. Shouldn't the most frequent keys be on the home row? Is there any reason we can't swap the top two rows?

That's what I would have thought initially, but no, it turns out that this wasn't a concern all that much- it was more about being in the centre of the keyboard. I was surprised too.

For punctuation we have (the equivalents of) . , ? ! < > + - x ÷ = ord frac exp. And the digits 0-9. I'd like a Á key as well.

As it happens the typewriter was invented by flaids. Flaidish needs three more letters, and I think the idea of "three more letters" would be part of the standard layout, but used differently in different countries. In Verduria they could be used for the three extra letters needed for Cadhinor. If I'm not mistaken Kebreni would get by with three extra too. (Ismain no.)

Now that changes everything! If the original layout was developed based on Flaidish, it's probable that this was exported elsewhere with only minimal modification: look at how regional variants on QWERTY don't really change all that much. What's the Flaidish corpus like, beyond what's in the online grammar?

[Emily]

this is really cool!

i was going to argue against the idea of a dead key (at least on the original typewriter layout), but it looks like they did actually exist in the days of the mechanical typewriter. they would have to be special keys that would type without the carriage moving. it seems like it would be easiest to accomplish this by having the dead key located on one edge of the layout or the other, and this seems to be confirmed by pictures i'm finding of spanish-language mechanical keyboards, which all seem to have a key labeled ´ ¨ on the right-hand side (some also bear a key marked ` ^, presumably for use in portuguese and/or french). the exact placement of this presumed dead key differs from machine to machine, however (1, 2, 3). i think a combined key like spanish makes sense for verdurian (presumably on a typewriter they would position the diacritics to match capitals, leaving some white space above the lowercase letters, although i suspect the irl spanish typewriters did the opposite, spacing the accents for lowercase and just not using them at all for capitals; on a computer, of course, the issue is moot)

here's an attempt with the additional characters zompist mentioned (although i could only find two non-verdurian caďinor letters, H and Ť; am i missing another one?:

0 <	1 >	2 +	3 -	4 x	5 ÷	6 =	7 th	8 /	9 ^	´ ¨
Y	E	A	I	C	O	R	U	N	K	Ť
Č	Z	P	L	M	T	S	Ë	V	Á	? !
Ď	H	Ř	F	B	Ž	D	Š	G	X	. ,

(X = cadhinor h, th = ordinal, / = fraction, ^ = exponent)

in the typewriter era they probably omitted the 1 and maybe 4 keys to save space, much like earth typewriters would omit 1 and sometimes 0 (my mechanical has 0 but omits 1)

[So Haleza Grise]

That's awesome!

I'm tempted to just use it, but I have one quibble. Shouldn't the most frequent keys be on the home row? Is there any reason we can't swap the top two rows?

That's what I would have thought initially, but no, it turns out that this wasn't a concern all that much- it was more about being in the centre of the keyboard. I was surprised too.

For punctuation we have (the equivalents of) . , ? ! < > + - x ÷ = ord frac exp. And the digits 0-9. I'd like a Á key as well.

As it happens the typewriter was invented by flaids. Flaidish needs three more letters, and I think the idea of "three more letters" would be part of the standard layout, but used differently in different countries. In Verduria they could be used for the three extra letters needed for Cadhinor. If I'm not mistaken Kebreni would get by with three extra too. (Ismain no.)

Now that changes everything! If the original layout was developed based on Flaidish, it's probable that this was exported elsewhere with only minimal modification: look at how regional variants on QWERTY don't really change all that much. What's the Flaidish corpus like, beyond what's in the online grammar?

There's only one thing for it - we need a long short story in Flaidish!

[Emily]

hope i got these characters right, this is about what it would look like for the actual printing characters (as opposed to shift, enter, etc.)

(btw i couldn't find the exponent symbol in the verdurian font, do i have an older version maybe?)

[Emily]

as far as the rest of the layout, i think it's safe to assume there would be an enter/return, shift, backspace and/or delete, probably caps lock; once you get into computers, arrow keys and possibly other scroll-related functions like home/end/pgup/pgdn/escape come into play. would they have keys like control/alt/alt gr/windows (well not specifically windows lol)/that sort of thing? or like f1 through f12? i don't know enough about programming to know what kind of thing is more or less required for programming of any kind vs. what is specific to the kinds of programs that have become dominant through happenstance or whatever

i'm curious also what would the terms for any of these would be. like, what would be the verdurian word for "shift" or "escape"? when i did a keyboard layout for a conlang a couple of years back, i came up with what i thought were pretty good translations for everything (e.g. shift was translated as a verb "change", and caps lock was translated with a compound verb roughly meaning "remain changing"), but that was for a conlang set on earth using localized translations for the standardized key set. i'm not trying to make more work for zompist lol, i just can't help thinking about this kind of thing!

[zompist]

Green, you're right about the Cadhinor letters; I miscounted.

The exp character isn't in my font. With an old typewriter, you could create it manually by backspacing, rolling the carriage up a bit, and typing the mult character again. Ah, all the ways you can mess around with a typewriter... which reminds me, we need an underline key.

Checking the font, I noticed one unnamed character, under hyphen. I'll have to give it a name.

On the other hand, an early keyboard doesn't really need the ord character; you can just type "e". The frac character isn't needed so long as it's possible to type the diacritics alone. (Though the placement is different.)

I would make . , the unshifted keys, and ? ! the shifted ones.

One typo on your diagram— you have "a" for "Á".

I'll come up with names for the function keys.

I don't have a long Flaidish text, sorry...

[sasasha]

I had a go at making this and doing a bit of typing.

More: show

From the first go I would say that a and e feel a bit close. But it's good, all round!

You can download it and use it yourself with the (fantastic, free) android app Keyboard Designer.

You can remove the suggestion bar - but now I'm dreaming of giving it a Verdurian dictionary (you can add custom wordlists on the app...)

Edit:
BTW, I can’t work out a way to use this (on Android) to type actually in the Verdurian font. The nearest I got was using a web app like FontDrop! ‒ but certain characters weren’t mapped to the equivalent Latin Unicode characters that I chose for them, namely Ť, Č, Á, Ď, Ř, Ž, Š, ť, č, ď, ř, ž, š, −, ×, ÷.

With X, x and the fraction sign, the equivalents are odd anyway ‒ I applied the first two to Caďinor H and Kebreni h́, and for the second I used a combining lower diaerises as a Latin equivalent (2̤ seems quite a cool way to notate 1/2, incidentally). Wrt X, x I think realistically an early Verdurian keyboard would have a capital Kebreni H́ as the base letter, and use a vuáë to make it approximate Caďinor H. Thus this design is compatible for Verdurian, Caďinor and Kebreni. (Another option would be to keep X as Caďinor H but use the lower-case key for the hyphen. It’s no longer good for Kebreni, but the hyphen is important and perhaps Verdurians don’t care about compatiblity that much...? They could be rival approaches, of course.)

Did the flaids have their own, even earlier, design, based on Flaidish letter frequencies? If so, did it survive, or get gobbled up by a Verdurian alternative such as this one? Or does everyone use the Flaidish one still (which presumably isn’t this, since dewrad built it on a Verdurian text)?

I have thus updated the file ‒ in case anyone uses it and wants to type in this way, those keys are programmed to produce the correct character in that mode (i.e. if typing in the newer version of the Verdurian font) if you swipe down on the key.

I hear we may be getting a new Verdurian font soon (sorry if this constitutes spoilers!) so I’ll probably wait to see how that is mapped and then try and work it out into as smooth a design as possible.

Here’s a screenshot of me nearly at the holy grail ‒ being able to type directly in Verdurian script on my phone.

More: show

[zompist]

I hear we may be getting a new Verdurian font soon (sorry if this constitutes spoilers!) so I’ll probably wait to see how that is mapped and then try and work it out into as smooth a design as possible.

Just to answer this bit... the new font pretty much has to be character-for-character identical to the old; the idea is that you can take a text and change the font and everything works. And I'm afraid the encoding is designed for Macs.

I am considering adding copies of characters to the Latin Extended A code points. That would allow you to write texts with Šš and so on and they'd appear correctly.

I forgot the neat keyboard arrangements here... since dewrad and others did most of the work I will try to adapt them.

[sasasha]

I am considering adding copies of characters to the Latin Extended A code points. That would allow you to write texts with Šš and so on and they'd appear correctly.

That would be amazing, if it’s not too much trouble!