It is almost impossible to write in French correctly with a keyboard marketed in France

[dalekphalm]

C is necessary because of the instances of "ch". I can't think of an alternative at this exact moment. K is necessary for words like "know", even though the K is silent.

 

Meh. I've never found English to be as complicated as people claim it is. Probably because it's my native language, and probably because my mom is an English major, and made damn sure my sister and I were just as proficient as her.

What @Ryan_Vickers is saying is that the letter "c" is pointless, when in all other circumstances (it kind of makes me lol when I use a word with 'c' in it to make my point), the letter "c" can be replaced with either an "s" or a "k".

 

Therefore, you could respell all "s" sounding "c" words with "s", and "k" sounding "c" words with "k". As an example: "circumstances" would be respelled as "sirkumstanses" - yeah it looks fucking stupid, and is obviously misspelled, but only because we're used to the current system. If "ess" sounding "c" was always an "s", and "kay" sounding "c" was always a "k", that spelling would look normal to us.

 

Furthermore, the point of "ch" being the only uniquely "c" sounding word - well in that case, you're simply replacing one character with another. Rather than "ch", we would replace with with another character completely - or hell, just have the letter "c" make the "ch" sound (eg: "scool" would sound like "school").

 

We're not adding any extra characters - we're just replacing one with another, or repurposing an otherwise redundant letter, and cutting out the unnecessary "h" from "ch".

 

Make sense?

 

I'm saying that them having their own letter would be more effort than just knowing that when a c directly precedes an h, it makes the "ch" sound. Or else you end up with the Chinese alphabet with like 3000 characters or whatever it is.

 

I find it easier to keep track of a correlation between a sound, and the formation of a small number of letters that make that sound, rather than remembering several hundred or thousand letters.

 

A few letters that can be arranged in many ways > a shitload of letters, many of which only have one use, however frequent or infrequent that usage may be.

 

It's "many symbols vs. many possible arrangements for fewer symbols".

[AresKrieger]

Qwerty or dvorak other weird country standards will likely not stick, and mostly seem idiotic, unless they are minor alterations (like pounds instead of dollar or something to that effect)

 

Edit: Apparently french speakers already has a standard so.......wtf is the reasoning behind this, no one is going to jump ship.

[patrick3027]

Qwerty or dvorak other weird country standards will likely not stick, and mostly seem idiotic, unless they are minor alterations (like pounds instead of dollar or something to that effect)

Most french speaking people are using an AZERTY keyboard and I don't see that going away anytime soon.

EDIT:

Also a lot of people are using a QWERTZ keyboard.

And when I speak about French speaking people, it's mainly France and Belgium. Québec uses a variant of the QWERTY keyboard.

What's funny is that, unlike QWERTY, there's no generally accepted explanation for the creation AZERTY keyboard. Nobody really knows where it comes from.

[AresKrieger]

Most french speaking people are using an AZERTY keyboard and I don't see that going away anytime soon.

I was unaware, well if they have a long term standard already this will go nowhere regardless, but good to know either way.

[suicidalfranco]

Why not make a keyboard that uses the phonetic alphabet

[vanished]

Why does there even need to be different layouts for such similar languages?  Sure, there are things like Japanese that are totally different and would likely need their own layout, and even to a lesser extent Russian because they have a notably different number of letters, but for everything like English, French, German, etc. that - more or less - uses the same alphabet (plus a few accents) it should be possible to create one layout that everyone could use comfortably.  Does anyone think it wouldn't be possible?