[Localization] Please test the SCIM based Amharic keyboard layout

tegegne tefera tefera.tegegne at gmail.com
Fri Dec 5 16:05:03 EST 2008


Yes Sayamindu
The mapping should have been h -> ህ  or l -> ል.
As it stands now it is h -> ሀ and l -> ለ

I see the physical design of the keyboard and having the first letter to
represent the key should not make any difference. I have not seen any paper
or suggestion on which letter should be written on the key. one can make a
case for both of them. But my concern is the mapping, that is which letter
should be shown on the screen when the key is hit without a qualifier
(vauel). And there is a universal agreement that it should be the 6th
charactor since almost 60% of charactors in Amharic words or sentences are
made up of the 6th charactor and the 1st charactor has only about 20 to 30%
frequency. And XO will be the only computer that will be using this method.
That would not be good for the childeren as well as for the whole industry.


On Fri, Dec 5, 2008 at 9:35 PM, Sayamindu Dasgupta <sayamindu at gmail.com>wrote:

> Hi Tegegne,
> Thanks for the input.
>
> On Sat, Dec 6, 2008 at 1:59 AM, tegegne tefera <tefera.tegegne at gmail.com>
> wrote:
> > Hei Edward and Saymundu
> >
> > There is some thing terribly wrong with the character mapping as it
> stands
> > on the db file. That is mapping the first letter (as it is known geez in
> > Amharic) to the lower case characters in Latin scripts. Mapping this way
> > almost doubles the amount of key strokes needed to type a word or a
> > sentence.
>
>
>
> Are you mentioing the mappings such as: h -> ሀ ?
> This is due to the physical design of the keyboard. See
> http://wiki.laptop.org/go/OLPC_Amharic_Keyboard for how it looks like.
>
> Thanks,
> Sayamindu
>
> --
> Sayamindu Dasgupta
> [http://sayamindu.randomink.org/ramblings]
>
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