Glencoe Keyboarding with Computer Applications

Unit 1: Keyboarding

Social Studies Connection: Lesson 2

Social Studies Connection : Non-English Keyboards

Introduction
Compare English keyboards to keyboards used for entering other languages.

Directions
Read the information below and apply what you learn to answer the questions. Write your answers on a separate piece of paper, or key them into the spaces below.

Keying in Different Languages
Word processing programs are available in many languages and they must have corresponding keyboards and displays. Microsoft® Windows XP, for example, can support more than 140 languages, and is available in home and office editions in 24 languages.

The English keyboard has 24 characters, numbers 0 – 9, frequently-used punctuation marks and symbols, and a variety of function and command keys. Keyed text is displayed on the monitor screen from left to right. Many languages, however, use more than 24 characters and require additional accents and other marks. Languages such as Arabic and Hebrew not only use a different alphabet, but are written and displayed from right to left. East Asian languages such as Chinese and Japanese use very complex characters and are often written from top to bottom.

Below are some examples of keyboards used with different languages. Some, like Spanish, would not be very difficult for English keyboarders to use since they share the same basic alphabet. Others use different alphabets, but have similar letter layouts and fingering positions to the English keyboard. Finally, writing systems like traditional Chinese require a great deal of skill for entering symbols on the keyboard.

Latin Alphabets Like English, Spanish and German keyboards use the Latin alphabet. However, both languages use additional characters and symbols. Spanish, for example, uses the ñ and German has the ß. Both languages also use diacritic marks or accents, which are lines or dots above or below letters. Sometimes special keys are programmed for those marks.

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Other Alphabets Hebrew and Greek both use different alphabets from English, but many of the individual letters are equivalent to English letters. For example, the equivalent to the letter p in Greek is p (pi).

<a onClick="window.open('/olcweb/cgi/pluginpop.cgi?it=jpg::::/sites/dl/free/0078693160/343400/act1_hebrew_kb.jpg','popWin', 'width=NaN,height=NaN,resizable,scrollbars');" href="#"><img valign="absmiddle" height="16" width="16" border="0" src="/olcweb/styles/shared/linkicons/image.gif"> (56.0K)</a>

<a onClick="window.open('/olcweb/cgi/pluginpop.cgi?it=jpg::::/sites/dl/free/0078693160/343400/act1_greek_kb.jpg','popWin', 'width=NaN,height=NaN,resizable,scrollbars');" href="#"><img valign="absmiddle" height="16" width="16" border="0" src="/olcweb/styles/shared/linkicons/image.gif"> (57.0K)</a>

Other Writing Systems East Asian languages such as Chinese and Japanese use writing systems where one character represents a word or concept. There are thousands of characters, and obviously they all cannot be represented on a keyboard. Instead, individual keystrokes are combined into a character. When traditional Chinese is input on American-style keyboards, an Input Method Editor (IME) helps convert keyboard strokes into the Chinese characters.

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Find Information on a Web Site The keyboards illustrated here are taken from the Microsoft Web site at http://www.microsoft.com/globaldev/reference/keyboards.mspx. If this link is inactive, or if you need to find other Internet sites with similar information, ask your teacher for permission to use a search engine. Here are some keywords you might use: non-English keyboards, international keyboard layouts.

*Microsoft product screen shot(s) reprinted with permission from Microsoft Corporation.

1
Describe two ways that keying Arabic and Hebrew is different from keying English.
2
Why wouldn't it be difficult for an English speaker to use a Spanish keyboard?
3
What are diacritic marks?
4
Why is it difficult to key traditional Chinese?
5
What does an Input Method Editor do?
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