Capital Punishment?

[mongers]

Is France's unloved AZERTY keyboard heading for the scrapheap?
By Hugh Schofield
BBC News, Paris
21 January 2016
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Media caption
Hugh Schofield looks at the quirks of the AZERTY keyboard

France's 100 year-old AZERTY keyboard - the equivalent of the English-language QWERTY - is to be reconfigured after the government ruled that it encourages bad writing.

The AZERTY set-up has infuriated generations of writers, because of labour-creating peculiarities like the need for two strokes to make full-stops and numerals.

But official ire is directed less at such inconveniences, and more at certain quirks and oversights which, it says, make it hard to construct proper French.

"Today it is practically impossible to write French correctly using a keyboard that has been bought in France," the ministry intones.

"More surprisingly, certain European countries like Germany and Spain respect French writing better than the French are able to - because their keyboards permit it!"

The culture ministry has commissioned Paris-based consultancy AFNOR to draw up a list of recommendations by the summer.

The aim is to produce a new standard keyboard that will gradually replace the many varieties of AZERTY currently on the market.
What's wrong with AZERTY?

AZERTY was introduced as a French adaptation of the original QWERTY keyboard on US typewriters at the start of the 20th Century.

The main problem identified by the culture ministry is the difficulty for French writers to use "certain accented characters - and especially in upper-case".

Some common lower-case accented letters - like é (e-acute) and è (e-grave) - have dedicated keys on AZERTY.

The letter ù (u-grave) also has its own key, even though it is used in only one word in the entire French language - où, meaning where.

But other accented letters are harder to compose. And accented capital letters require manoeuvres of which, according to the ministry, most people are unaware.

This ignorance, and the consequent growing disuse of accented capitals, has given rise to the widespread belief that good French does not need them. Most people think that ignoring an accent on a capital letter is acceptable.

Not so! says the culture ministry, pointing out that both the Academie Francaise and the National Print have issued guidelines urging the use of accents on capitals.

A similar absence is that of a Ç - a capital C-cedilla, with the curly bit beneath signifying that it is pronounced like an 's'. Again the ministry says people think it is not necessary, but it is.
.....

Full item here:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/blogs-eu-35365604

[Archy]

Do we Flemish need to change our keyboards too? Or do we join the Dutch and the Axis of Qwerty

[mongers]

Do we Flemish need to change our keyboards too? Or do we join the Dutch and the Axis of Qwerty

Nonsense, you just go straight to voice recognition/dictation software. 

It's odd, years ago that software was supposed to revolutionise how we working with computer and yet, outside a few specialist fields, the vast majority of us still use keyboards. 

[Martinus]

mongers the clickbait

[Duque de Bragança]

Do we Flemish need to change our keyboards too? Or do we join the Dutch and the Axis of Qwerty

There's a modified Belgian Azerty vs QZERTY/QWERTZ/QWERTY?  Seems so, after all there's a French Swiss and French Canadian keyboard (modified QWERTY for the latter I believe).
Not to mention the Apple variants of the same keyboards...

[Josquius]

I always thought they used qwertz like switzerland.
You learn something every day.

No comment on France.  There the situation is a little different sInce they aren't using the international standard. But in the English speaking world there have been studies to find the optimum keyboard (hint: it's not qwerty) yet we stick with our typewriter friendly keyboards just as we stick for floppy disk save icons

[Grey Fox]

Do we Flemish need to change our keyboards too? Or do we join the Dutch and the Axis of Qwerty

There's a modified Belgian Azerty vs QZERTY/QWERTZ/QWERTY?  Seems so, after all there's a French Swiss and French Canadian keyboard (modified QWERTY for the latter I believe).
Not to mention the Apple variants of the same keyboards...

Yes QWERTY based.

[Eddie Teach]

This thread & title are not Siegebreaker-approved. 

[Duque de Bragança]

https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/AZERTY#/media/File:Latin_keyboard_layouts_by_country_in_Europe_map.PNG

Map to visualise the keyboard layout(s) in Europe.

[Syt]

AZERTY? I thought French keyboards looked like this:

[Grey Fox]

There's a joke there somewhere, I am sure.

[Duque de Bragança]

There's a joke there somewhere, I am sure.

OOOHLALALA = Ouh là là

[Eddie Teach]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y0zlaopw6qo

[Grey Fox]

'merica!

[Eddie Teach]

Hey, it's the German guy that made the joke.