Why Aren't Keyboards In Alphabetical Order?
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- Опубликовано: 27 янв 2022
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SOURCES & FURTHER READING
The Legend Of The QWERTY Keyboard: www.smithsonianmag.com/arts-c...
A Brief History Of The QWERTY Keyboard: www.cnet.com/news/a-brief-his...
The Lie About QWERTY Keyboards: www.theatlantic.com/technolog...
QWERTY On OED: www.oed.com/view/Entry/156940
History Of Typewriters: www.ibm.com/ibm/history/exhib...
Sholes & Glidden Typewriter: www.branchcollective.org/?ps_a...
Henry Mills: type-writer.org/?p=4720
Non-QWERTY Keyboards: www.mentalfloss.com/article/5...
KALQ: techcrunch.com/2013/04/24/kalq
What’s your keyboard layout of choice? And what do keyboards look like in your part of the works!
I use the qwerty keyboard
Danish QWERTY with æøå
QWERTZUIOPÜ. The common German layout.
Well, I'm German, so it's a QWERTZ-layout for me
I use 11 different layouts for various languages, some more than others, but for Latin-based alphabets I use macOS's ABC - Extended layout since it gives me access to nearly every accent or diacritical mark and most of the non-English letters I would need to type. It's like QWERTY, key combinations involving the option key give me the other letters. For example, to type an ã I hit Option-N A.
For the Japanese 12-keys keyboard on mobile phones, you can either tap, or flick up/down/left/right on each button box, resulting in 5 possible variation of letters. And since japanese only have 5 vowels (a,i,u,e,o), it makes it easy to group them together into a single button. For example, Ka, Ki, Ku, Ke, Ko will all be in one single button box.
That's great! I'm a fan of the Kana Japanese writing systems but still haven't memorised them and have little use of them except when English words turn up phonetically, since I barely know any Japanese words.
I personally just use a romaji keyboard. It’s easier and faster for me.
@@wannabehistorian371 Same here. I also just use the qwerty keyboard.
I've never liked that style of the keyboard, ngl. It makes sense for how the language works but I just use the keyboard that lets me manually write the characters
Fun fact about the Hebrew keyboard: it is actually the Yiddish keyboard, a language spoken by Ashkenazi Jews who were the ones to renew the ancient biblical Hebrew in Palestine in the 19th century (both the languages use the same alphabet). The Yiddish keyboard did not change at all, so the letters are spread out according to Yiddish spelling convenience and not Hebrew spelling.
In Turkey, there are two types of keyboards. QWERTY with Turkish letters("Turkish Q Keyboard") and F keyboard(search "Turkish F Keyboard" if you are curious). Appearently, Turkish F keyboard is a remnant of the typewriter era and is still used by some institutions. But, Turkish Q is the most commonly used layout because it's mostly compatible with regular QWERTY layout apart from the symbols and i/I(dotted and dotless i) letters.
the placement of the I and O make sense now too. If you shift the numbers one spot over, the 10 is diagonally after the 9. It makes for a pretty intuitive find. It might be why the 0 is where it is rather than before the 1.
Yeah it was considered an unnecessary luxury to have extra keys and all their extra parts for 1 and 0 when l and O could do. I don’t think it became needed until computers needed key recognition.
In France we only use the azerty lay out. qwerty are a no go. It's important to note that there is also a lot of accent an different letter that are added on the lay out to be able to write all possible letters.
You can type french using an european spanish keyboard. Those are QWERTY but have the Ç and the accents for french. Edit: And yeah, having been in France, it was a PITA.
In french Canada we use qewerty with very similar shortcuts
In Brazil, we use the ABNT keayboard, which is just qwerty with extra keys, like Ç on the right side of L.
In Poland we simply use QWERTY, and for all our special letters like ąężźół we simply use ctrl+letter (For ż it is ctrl+z and for ź it is ctrl+x)
It's also worth noting that the standard azerty keyboard doesn't allow for the full range of French special characters to be typed. There are plenty that are impossible (or incredibly difficult) to type on an azerty keyboard : Ç « » Œ Æ É È À
Thé bépo layout aims to solve that, in addition to have a letter distribution that actually makes sense.
In German spoken Countries we use the QWERTZ keyboard. It´s simular to the QWERTY but because in the German Language Z is more often used as Y they skipped place. There are also the letters Ü, Ö, Ä on the right side of the letter rows.
In ex Yugoslavia all languages use QWERTZ, when using Latin alphabet. I think, this is case for the most of Europe. Our additional characters are on the same place as German (5 of them).
In Cyrillic alphabet, everything is same, except Q, W and X are replaced by additional characters, which are in Latin script combination of 2 letters: LJ (like: ly), NJ (like: ny) and DŽ (like German Dsch) - Cyrillic: Љ, Њ and Џ. And Y is replaced by Ѕ, that is present in other Cyrillic scripts (it's not Latin S). Those letters (Q, W, X and Y) are not present in our scripts natively, but are still there for use with foreign names and when using Cyrillic you need to transcribe them anyway.
However, QUERTZ is standard. And this is probably because of early German (mostly Austrian) influence on our writing.
2:54 that Japanese keyboard shows the 'a' sounds: a, ka, sa, ta, na, ha, ma, ya, ra, wa. You get these characters by tapping them like you would on a qwerty touchscreen.
You can get the characters of the other 4 vowels by holding the a variant and sliding up for u, down for o, left for i, and right for e. Kinda wish these last two were in reverse.
Then above the keyboard a bar will try to predict the kanji you might mean depending on the sounds you typed and the context you're in.
This seems a lot slower and more cumbersome. I knew about the kanji but I figured they just spelled the romanji and it would give them the hiragana or katakana.
@@Altrantis it's actually faster. You just swipe. Muscle memory takes over quickly. The buttons are larger than on querty so you're less likely to mistype and you basically type two alphabetical letters at once most of the time.
Romaji also comes with the problem that there are different characters that are written the same in kanji. じ and ぢ are both 'ji' and ず and づ are both 'zu'. It has to do with their unvoices equivalents (shi, chi, su, tsu) and some voicing rules in Japan.
Computers aren't that good at context so inputting hiragana directly is far less error prone. There's also the 'n' ん, which is the only solitary consonant, which can act really weird when parsing from romanji.
Lastly, wouldn't you type better in your native script too? Pushing them to use qwerty would put them at an artificial disadvantage. Imagine you knew Chinese conversationally (though you rarely use it in day to day life), but you had to use a keyboard with Chinese symbols to write in English.
@@deldarel while that’s true for phones, almost everyone on a computer with a physical keyboard uses romaji in their IME; the kana layer on the keyboard is still there, but increasingly seen as just an old person option, with the odd young exception who prefers it. IIRC this is since roman characters are also used in various places when typing modern conversational Japanese, and so more people are inclined to get romaji QWERTY muscle memory on a physical keyboard but have the different 12-key muscle memory for one-handed typing on a phone. Of course, using a physical keyboard at all is beginning to be seen as an old person thing now, so this could shift quite a lot in the next decade or two.
You sure made me feel old. The typewriters used in my high school in the 70s did not have "0" or "1" and relied on "O" and "I". I also remember complaining to Mr. O'Brien, the typing teacher, about the keyboard layout and he said nothing about keys jamming and instead said that Qwerty was the most efficient layout based on dominant fingers and frequency of use of the letters.
I remember going to an internet cafe in Paris during a trip as a child and using their keyboard layout was like navigating a minefield (for someone who was taught to type on QWERTY in school without looking at the keyboard).
I've never seen a typewriter that actually has a 1 or 0, and when I took typing class in 1978 we didn't even have electrics in class, just ancient manual typewriters.
Got tripped up by my Belgian friend's AZERTY keyboard when visiting him in Ghent.
And I hated the repeated key presses on old pushbutton phones just to get the letter I wanted, I usually missed on one side or the other and had to go round again.
So glad to have a touchscreen keyboard on my phone with multiple language support and special letters, so it's easy for me to type letters like ζ,β, Ξ, Þþ, Ææ, Ðð, Э, £, я, Д, & 1, 45°, ©, & ç.
So much harder to do on my pc keyboard.
One big pain with cell phone keypads was if you wanted 2 or more letters a row from the same key. If the next letter was from a different key, you could just press that key. But for another letter from the _same_ key, you either had to wait a few seconds for the previous letter to auto-accept, or use the right cursor key on that D-pad-like ring (if your phone supported that). Words like "back" (3 letters on a key) or "high" (all 4 letters) or "feeder" (5 letters) took _significantly_ longer to type, as did anything with "non-" or "mono-". I can only imagine my impatience if I'd ever wanted to type "nonmonogamous" or "nonmonomorphic" in a dumbphone text. 🙂
EDIT: And yah, one thing I like about Linux is the easy ability to set a Compose key for characters that aren't otherwise on the keyboard (I use the right Windows key). Accented letters are [Compose] + + usually (like á is [Compose]['][a]), and other letters and symbols have other sequences based on what they look like or what makes them up.(like æ is [Compose][a][e], the degree sign ° is [Compose][o][o], the German esszett ß is [Compose][s][s], and the ½ fraction is [Compose][1][2]). There's also a text config file where you can edit the sequences if you want, or add new ones.
In Asia, they had to develop a keyboard where the keyboard tries to predict a character with a bunch of characters with similar spelling (in letters) as the person types the character out in letters (not sure if that makes any sense).
In general, that's called an IME
Japanese keyboards, for example, had 3 keys in spacebar area. I believe they were "Change", "Don't Change" and "Space". They would type in Romaji(Latin) by default. If the letter combination made a valid Japanese syllable, it would become Hiragana.
- "Change" would change the typed character to Kanji or Katakana.
- "Don't Change" would keep it in Hiragana or Romaji and let you type a new syllable/word.
- "Space" would behave the same as the regular spacebar.
@@proCaylak and using an IME on a non-Japanese keyboard, enter and space are the change and don’t change keys (it’s been a while since I used it but IIRC enter was change and space was don’t change?)
My mom had a typewriter when I was young. She didn’t use it much since we had a computer, so I used it as a toy until it broke. It helped me practice typing and copying.
Thank you for mentioning Dvorak and Colemak at the end.
Also, AZERTY is just French QWERTY.
I was today years old when i learned what QWERTY was 🤣
QWERTY, QWERTZ, AZERTY and the rare QZERTY
I find it lovely that this channel has such an international community.
I clicked this video hoping it would dispel that old myth about jamming typewriters, and you did. Full marks.
When I learned to type in the '70s, we were taught to use a lower-case "l" for a 1, rather than a capital I. Even in the late '70s, though, it was standard for the number row to begin with 2. The exclamation point (now found as the shift of 1) was formed by typing and apostrophe, back-spacing, and then typing a period.
Yup, and I've seen a legacy of that in some computer documents, where someone who learned to type on a manual typewriter would occasionally drop into old muscle memory and type a lowercase L in place of a 1.
If I remember right, it was the IBM Selectric of the 1960s that really standardized adding a 1 (and !) to the typewriter keyboard. It also set a new standard for the symbols on the US layout, which other electric typewriters -- and later, computer keyboards -- copied.
Yeah a lowercase L is best for special elite font typers.
I love how the poster at 0:28 - 0:46 has an alien/xenomorph for X
I used one of those old typewriters that didn't have a 1 or 0, only I and O, back in middle school in a typing class. I liked pointing out how out-of-date everything was--not just the typewriters, but the habits of "good typing" which make no sense on a computer. Alas, computers weren't as common yet, so my comments were ignored.
The keys that are horizontally adjacent aren’t actually right next to each other on a typewriter keyboard-for that, you have to look at the weird diagonals that the letters and numbers are on. The order of the type bars in the basket is based on the horizontal distribution of the center of the key: QA2ZWS3XED4CRF5VTG6B etc. The Q is the furthest left, then the A, then the 2, then the Z. So O and P have three other characters between them, as do E and R.
in Brazil, the most common layout is a QWERTY with a few modifications: there's a Ç next to the L and then ^ and ~ are right next to it. ´ and ` are next to P and the quotation marks are next to 1. ¨ is on the shift top of 6
Separate letters ? CDE are one above the other, then, there are FGH and JKL that are also in order in both the QWERTY and AZERTY (JKLM in this case) layouts.
My pet peeve is those games that, when localized in French, assume that you can only have an AZERTY keyboard.
Video games shouldn't base it on the letter output, since that's bad design. A Russian player wouldn't be able to play on their normal layout unless the game takes that into consideration.
Another option is using the virtual keys, which is more likely the case. Still will not work and be bad on AZERTY, Dvorak, Turkish F and so on.
Games should use scan codes. Scan codes are the actual physical locations of keys. Regardless if your keyboard is QWERTY, QWERTZ or AZERTY, the keys are all the same as far as the computer can see. The only difference is the labels put on the keyboard. This means you can set the layout to AZERTY or QWERTY on any physical keyboard and it'll work.
So for proper WASD gaming on any layout, the game should use the keys: second to the right of tab, and the the three keys right next to the caps lock key. This will work on all standard keyboards made for computers, regardless of the layout.
A rabbit hole you could down that is somewhat related to this topic is silent letters, as in the how and why they exist. Take the word queue, for example, where the last 4 letters are all silent.
Blame french. Almost all instances of this in english is because of french.
ik ur probably joking but "queue" only has 2 silent letters lol
@@eduardoxenofonte4004 OK then, pronounce "q" and tell me it sounds different than "queue" 😉
@@spddiesel oh my god... the letter "Q", like any other letter, sounds different on its own than in a sentence, say "query", it could be pronounced /'kwεri/, not /'kyu:wεri/, what sounds is the "Q" responsible for? any sane person would say that the Q is responsible for the /k/ phoneme, Q is pronounced as /k/, you only say /'kyu:/ if you're referring to the LETTER "Q", in ANY OTHER CASE, Q's sound is /k/
@@eduardoxenofonte4004 or, sarcasm.
Just before you mention old mobile phone keypab typing I was thinking most people type with one thumb on a screen now so a variation of that keypad could reduce the stretch and precision needed to type, but with gestures rather than having to press several times. Gestures could be just as hard on the thumb though... I actually loved typing on those mobile phones and I have one as my mobile still now! I remember predictive text annoyed me, less thumb presses but words sometimes had to be swapped, whereas without it I could type on the keypad under the desk or in my pocket and never have to look at the screen to write a text!
But Colemark and Dvorak doesn't start with thous letters.
JCUKEN is fun to get used to but the Kazakh keyboard replaces numbers with their special letters
Also QWERTY is really weird because I'm just so used to QWERTZ
The jamming wasn't caused by two keys being next to each other, but the type-bars being next to each other. The keys are in several rows but the type bars are in single file. Adjacent keys don't move adjacent bars, and the jams would happen from two adjacent bars being used in succession. Once they'd arrived at the most jam-resistant order for the type bars then the keyboard followed from the shortest connections between bars and keys.
I have tried a really old, like, early 1900s typewriter and it becomes a lot more obvious what causes blocks in those. It's the lever thingies, since they're in each other's path, so if 2 *levers* that are next to each other go at it they'll get stuck together.
Yet he found little evidence to support this, which is interesting. I'm inclined to believe his conclusion since I have had regular qwerty typewriters and found them jamming pretty easily when typing still with the only way to really combat it being a sense for that typewriter and how fast you can safely type.
That's how I understood it; two adjacent keys on the keyboard are connected to type bars 4 bars apart. When I used to have a manual typewriter, adjacent type bars would still occasionally jam.
In Poland we simply use QWERTY, and for all our special letters like ąężźół we simply use ctrl+letter (For ż it is ctrl+z and for ź it is ctrl+x)
What about ctrl + c And ctrl + v?
Ctrl + x Is Cut?
Azerty is a failed attempt? I'm fetching popcorn and wait for the French to attack :D
But seriously the only and best reason is that you have all the important letters close by, that's why in france it's azerty because they need the z and y more than the w and the q more than the a. In the same vain Germany uses qwertz because they use z more often than y so it makes sense to move it up.
The Netherlands also use QWERTY. Hungary uses QWERTS, I think
*QWERTZ
When I was at university we had no computers and I had no typewriter. I had a paper that had to be typed so I borrowed a typewriter from my neighbours who were from the Netherlands. I believe their typewriter was a German one, but I know the letters were not where they were supposed to be! Like you, I don't touch-type, but at least I know where the letters are on a qwerty keyboard! Not so with a German one.
Oh, dear. You just had to remind us of how badly text worked on those ancient flip-phones! However, one of the things I love about modern touch-screens is that if you're multilingual, you can just hold a letter key down to get the various accented character options.
I can actually remember hearing about typewriters where this could be done, sort of -- but it involved changing type-balls or whatever in order to get alternate characters, foreign alphabets, or other typefaces like italics. At least the last of the electronic typewriters (aka "word processors") to come in before computers did have a lot more options for those special characters, chosen via ctrl/function etc. keys.
I feel so lucky starting learning third language when touchscreen devices already exist 😂.
I bought a keyboard from Amazon Spain.
It also uses qwerty but some of the symbols are replaced with diacritics, an Ñ key, and a Ç key. You type the diacritic, then the vowel, and now you have ó or ü.
Because it's a European layout, the left shift is smaller to make room for a key
The latin american spanish keyboards are weird cause sometimes they're spanish, sometimes they're like an adaptation of the american one, and sometimes they're something in between. Mine uses they spanish layout for the space between shift and Z, but the letters are in the latin american order so I don't have Ç by default. I changed it to the european spanish keyboard because it lets me type in french.
Note that the layout and functions isn't determined by the physical keyboard you get, but the layout you pick on your computer.
In Spanish speaking countries we pretty much use the same keyboard as English speakers, except we add the Ñ letter and some tildes we use
So not the same then?
I liked the information about I/O and 1/0🤓. I will look for this on old type writers.
7:56 is where the answer to the title starts
In Germany I always saw the Qwertz layout. like just a normal keyboard with Y and Z switched places. i was also going to explain the Japanese one, but i saw someone already explained it
Qwerty ❤ When I traveled through various European counties and used hotel computers in 2005 before I had a cell phone, I did have to watch my typing more as certain keys would be different.
Skip to 7:59 to get to him talking about why the QWERTY keyboard is the way it is.
I grew up using Is of 1s using typewriter I think from the early 80s or later 70s.
(0:25) It's funny how you're so specific, yet resulting in a very limited worldview, since the Latin alphabet isn't the same in every language.
9:09 That might explain why some of the more "elegant" typefaces on computers today contain 1's and 0's that look like I's and O's.
Hi Name Explain at end of video it mistakenly has your outro?- The end statement segment twice in a row. Not a big deal just letting you know :-)
Typewriters is the short answer. There were technical reasons to lay out the keyboard like this for typewriters. Computers just took the keyboard from the typewriter as it was.
@2:05 - "Collins English Dictionary", which is far less comprehensive than the OED, lists at least twenty-seven words beginning with "q" and not followed by "u".
🍌🙂
Here we just use the qwerty keyboard, but with one extra letter. That being the ç
In Germany, there is the QWERTZ-layout. The main thing is, that from the QWERTY-layout, Y and Z are on opposite keys. There are other changes, too. right from the P, there is Ü. And right from the L is Ö and Ä. And the whole other figures are, besides numbers, are otherly ordered. For example, next to 0 is the key with ß, ? and \ on it.
Swedish took the German layout, replaced Ü with Å, replaced ß with +, and I don't remember the rest.
OK you're legit insane if you think T9 input is "the worst" I still wish for the days off that input. When I was in high-school in the early through mid 2000's I could easily text superfast with one hand, and having physical buttons instead of crappy on screen keyboard easily text without looking. I could text with my hand and the phone in my pocket, easily text while cycling or driving - again because I didn't need to look at it. Touchscreen input is 100% my least favourite input because you have to look at it while inputting.
Thai keyboard also follows its typewriter ancestor as the Thai script has no upper/lower case distinction and the total of characters is roughly double the latin (in one case) which was a lucky break, really. The Thai typewriter has 8 keys in the middle of the keyboard which don't move the carriage, to place one character above and/or below another, which was a relative doddle for computers.
I'm going to be completely honest with you, even though we learned how to type in school, I still cannot type on a keyboard, I have to look at it and type one letter at a time with one finger as I look for each letter when I'm done
I have never heard of keys jamming story until now.
Ngl I didn't even realise there were other keyboard layouts other than ones in other scripts (Arabic, Japanese, Cyrillic etc.)
QWERTZ, AZERTY...
@@kaengurus.sind.genossen Tom Scott's emoji extenstions keyboard
German keyboards have Y and Z mixed up. That's confusing in english video games sometimes, as they say Z when they mean Y on our keyboards.
11:57 I'd forgotten we used to do that, bad times.
Qwertz > Qwerty
if you don't mind me asking, where may you live/what language do you speak?
@@Pip_Bear
German, I guess
At least German keyboards use a QWERTZ-layout
Until you want to do a quick undo command
azerty gang rise up
It's going to be a bunch of frenchies.
cheeky hello internet reference, love it
Am I the only one that thought typewriters came about around the same time as the printing press?
The Linotype I noticed (I think) had a circular keyboard for creating letters, think it was in full alphabetical order which I never came to memorise or use quickly
I'm not sure how typewriters work but maybe it was important that keys near each other vertically needed to be not used in secession. The examples you used like E R are next to eachother horizontally. How often are W and S used one after another. Maybe the problem was even only jamming going down a row and not up. As in W S would be a problem but S W would be okay.
You thought that typing on the old phones was bad, try using them as controls for 3D adventure games.
We had a alphabetical keyboard at a store I worked at super confusing
Am I the only Genzer here with my own typewriter? It's a nice blue Smith-Corona Galaxie 12.
I always wondered why the keyboards looks like that
The spanish QWERTY also has the letter Ñ next to the L
Actually the lowercase "L" was used for one.
Can you explain why X makes a Z sound at the start of a word?
I'm actually still quicker with t9 than a qwerty keyboard
The German🇩🇪 keyboard uses QWERTZ plus the extra letters ä, ö, ü and ß
I use qwerty with swedish åäö and english
in my experience, l was used instead of 1, not I.
In Russian, we have ЙЦУКЕНГ, which is pronounced ytsookyeng XD
Yo tengo una aplicación asi
There's also azerty keyboards
“I know” or iKnow?
Te faltó poner la ñ bro xd
So... by the end of this presentation, you actually DO support the ''To Avoid Keys Jamming'' theory. You assert: ''... but there just isn't that much information out there on it being actually true...'' and proceed to offer some instances where alphabetically sequential letters occur on the QWERTY keyboard, making what is tantamount to a dismissal of the theory. Then you do a backflip: You state there is .... ''some validity''....to the theory, saying it resulted as ''... a natural progression... '' citing how Telegraph operators, who were ''...speedier typists'' found that the ''... letters weren't distributed well enough to make for quick and efficient typing...'' which ultimately led to manufacturers modifying keyboard layouts until the current QWERTY layout was confirmed ''... to fit the needs of these typists...' . So, in the end, it WAS To-Avoid-Keys-Jamming which gave us QWERTY.
Quick and efficient typing can also refer to the reach and spread of your fingers. Most people would type quicker on QWERTY than ABCDEF even with modern electronic keyboards. And Dvorak can type even faster than QWERTY, again with no actual type bars involved.
QWERTZ... Germanz being funnz.
By the way, I know it's because Z is used far more often in German than Y, but 8 years living in Germanz and I still order computers with QWERTY keyboards. At least I don't live in France.
You got to learn touch typing man
Who else types with a Dvorak keyboard?
Can you a video about why ships are called a she?
C D F G I J K M N O Q R S U V W X Y Z
The alphabet except "a l p h a b e t"
i have Qwertz
Japan has multiple languages and some of those languages don't have English words or kanji hence the multiple keyboards. Don't quote me on that, I'm not actually from japan
you mean multiple alphabets? (afaik they have 3 alphabets) and I‘m pretty sure japan speaks just japanese. Or you mean „chinese“ who speak mandrarin or cantonese?
HEY GUYS SECOND COMMENT HERE
QWERTY started off as just the result of creating a third row for vowels from an alphabetical two-row layout:
A E I . Y U O
B C D F G H J K L M
Z X W V T S R Q P N
Already halfway there, just a bit of rearrangement due to type bars jamming or ease of typing or whatever (I'm sure it was a mix of things, not one specific issue) and you get to the modern QWERTY layout.