European Dopers: a question for you...

Factual Questions
1

Here in the US, we use a 26-letter alphabet: abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvxwyz. We don’t use diacritical marks such as a cedilla, tilde, circumflex, umlaut, or macron, unless it’s a foreign-origin word, like resumé.

My question: do you have special keys set aside to type letters with these marks. Or do you have to type a special sequence to generate these characters.

Also, how’s your keyboard layed out? The typical US keyboard has the letters layed out thusly:


Q W E R T Y U I O P
 A S D F G H J K L
  Z X C V B N M
2

Our keyboards are the same, QWERTY layout. The Dutch language does use a trema in some words, which is accomplished by, e.g., first pressing " and then e, producing ë.

Same for French “accents”:
’ + e = é
` + e = è

Some more:

ALT + s = ß
~ + n = ñ

Et cetera. My question: I can do all this with my keyboard at work, but my home computer doesn’t do it. What settings do I need to change at home? Winblows 98.

3

We have a fáda which is used to change the sound of a letter.

Fáda sounds like foda.

The keyboard is qwerty.

I do notice that some of the characters are on different keys on American keyboards eg. the " and the @ sometimes swap places .

4

Yojimbo, my girlfriend computer has that too, but I think that’s an IBM thing. Terrible to work with.

5

That was because in the good old days before personal computers, the characters were mapped like this on typewriters for numbers:


Shift:     ! " # $ % & ' ( )
Unshifted: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 0
(zero had no upper case character)

When they assigned ASCII codes, these shifted characters got codes 33 - 41. Other characters like ^, @, ~, *, and ` got whatever odd numbers assignments were left.

Then as computer programming took off, it was noticed that @, *, and ^ were used a lot more often. So they got moved onto the number keys’ upper case, thus displacing " and ', and moving 6, 7, 8, and 9’s upper case to 7, 8, 9, and 0.

Of course, ASCII being already established, the codes were left alone.

6

another Ireland in here

on recent keyboards here we have

! " £ $ % ^ & * ( )
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 0

we have the £ and the $ symbol.

we produce our fada’s on the keyboard by pressing the CTL, ALT and the appropriate vowel. very recent keyboards now come with the Euro symbol loaded too.

7

Spanish keyboards have an extra key at the end of the third row for the n with a tilde. The @ sign and some of the other punctuation marks are in strange places. Otherwise it’s the standard QWERTY setup; I think accent marks are produced by some combination of the Shift, Ctrl, and Alt keys, but I never did learn how to do it. I’m sure Lawrence could tell you more if he’s still around.

8

Here at work, we’ve seen laptops from some of our European offices that have come in to be worked on. I worked on one from the netherlands, and one of my co-workers got a German one. The keyboard layouts are very similar, but there’s a few extra characters that are accesed by using a cntr + <key> combination. The really fun part with those machines was trying to navigate the Dutch and German versions of Windows. :slight_smile: