I’ve been dissatisfied with Keyman Yiddish support ever since I started using it (some ten years ago). The issue is not so much the keyboard mapping (which is intuitive to users of a qwerty keyboard), as in the underlying orthographic standard (the YIVO orthography), which has never enjoyed the support of most Yiddish readers and writers and these days is more popular in academic circles (since textbooks use the YIVO orthography) than among Yiddish speakers. I’ve found workarounds to some of its annoying features (for instance, a backspace will take the offending superfluous stroke above the letter FEY פֿ / פ, but to spell a word like VU ‘where’ the traditional way, with a silent ALEF װאו rather than the Soviet-YIVO way װוּ, with a superfluous Hebrew vowel mark, I have to resort to typing the V and U parts with a space between them and then deleting the space. To have it reflect what Dovid Katz rightly calls “mainstream 20th century orthography”, only a few individual key-to-character mappings would have to be changed; the complication seems to be with the two-keystroke logic which converts “ey” into אײ (fine), but also with sequences such as “vu”. So essentially I think I could adapt the existing keyboard to create an alternative Yiddish keyboard for myself and whoever else wants it. I downloaded a developer’s version of Keyman years back, but never got around to learning how to customize a keyboard. (I do have some programming experience, just not with Keyman.)
So my question is: would SIL be disposed to making available an alternative Yiddish keyboard (I would call it “Yiddish (traditional)”, if I designed/adapted one?
Hi Lee,
You tell me what you want, and I’ll put it together. No worries.
We can make time for it. If I can’t solve a problem, I’ll find people with the answers. We made need to have a couple Zoom sessions .
Best wishes,
Ken ken_keyes@sil.org
And yes, to answer the original question, we are always keen to add new distinct keyboards to the keyboard catalogue if they are helpful to users. An important aspect is clear descriptions of the keyboard(s) so users can tell which one they need!
That would be great. My suggested name for the new keyboard is “Yiddish (Traditional)”; the old one should be designated “Yiddish (YIVO)”.
The desired changes would be:
change the mapping from f to פ (instead of פֿ). (Plain letter FEY, instead of FEY with a ROFE; f before space should remain ף)
ditto for V → ב (instead of בֿ).
yi → ײ (instead of ייִ) . (No Hebrew vowel dot KHIRIK under YUD).
vu → װאו (instead of װוּ). (No Hebrew vowel dot MELUPM left of the VOV; separate TSVEY VOVN װ from adjacent consonant with silent ALEF א–see next rule).
voy → װאױ (instead of װױ, with three VOVs in a row, which should be disallowed. This is essential for writing “IKH VOYN” ‘I reside’ the normal way: איך װאױן.)
Lee
(Feel free to contact me by email or gmail chat at LeeG2@umbc.edu. My schedule is very flexible for this month. I could accommodate a Zoom meeting just about any time that’s convenient for you.)
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