Re: Keyboards!
Reply #29 –
I'd imagine a Western QWERTY keyboard would map reasonably well to related alphabets like Cyrillic, Greek, Hebrew, and Arabic. However, for a language like Chinese it must be horrible. Then again, I hear young Chinese people primarily use Pinyin for Chinese-character input.
The majority of composing methods use Pinyin, there are also some that are more related to the characters themselves, and a few other method. It is easy to fit, uses an ASCII (unless diacritical marks are included), and younger Chinese learn Pinyin at school anyway. With Pinyin QWERTZ and AZERTY would be horrible, as the Pinzin transcription uses Y, Z, W, Q, and A a lot, while these are relatively rare letters in English.
A huge advantage with Pinyin is that it allows alphabetical sorting, which is a lot more convenient, to me anyways, than
the alternatives. You sort by Pinyin, then by diacritics (tone marks), and then handle any remaining ambiguity by some other algorithm.