A classic keyboard I'd never seen before

The mother of one of my son's kindergarten classmates is a court recorder. With her in mind, I'd intended to include a mention of the shorthand keyboard in my earlier keyboard post, but it slipped my mind.

That turned out to be a good thing. When I mentioned this to her before school the other day, she took note and the very next day brought me an old stenotype shorthand machine that she'd had sitting around her garage. I got to take a look at it - and also at a textbook discussing the theory of how to use it.

Wow, this thing is cool.

Things I have learned:

1. The keys have no symbols on them. At all. My guess would be that this is because they don't want any reason for the recorder to look at the keyboard.

2. The keyboard has fewer keys. It has two rows of four to be covered by the fingers of the left hand, two rows of four to be covered by the fingers of the right hand, and a single pair of keys in between those two which are not letter symbols but asterisks. Below that are two keys to be accessed by the left thumb, and two keys to be accessed by the right thumb.

3. It is designed so the operator can type entire syllables at once - by pressing multiple keys at the same time. The left fingers do the consonants before the vowel; the right fingers do the consonants after the vowel (yes, there are repeats). The thumbs do the vowels in between.

4. It speaks its own language. This is a terrific example of humans adapting to the requirements of a machine, rather than the machine adapting to them. I guessed, and my friend confirmed, that it would take a semester to learn the theory behind how to enter all kinds of words on this thing. There is a key combination that must be used for the period, for example. Vowels tend to be entered phonetically rather than in accordance with English wacky spelling. This does not count the years of practice to raise your speed.

But of course the result is that these expert people can write down what they hear at an astonishing rate. On the machine my friend lent me, the letters are typed in ink on a paper tape about two inches wide, which used to be "read" and decoded by a computer. She tells me that nowadays these machines have direct USB connections to the interpreting computer, so the shorthand gets reinterpreted into English without the need for the intermediate step.

Cool technology. And it saves some trees.

Having made transcriptions of taped speech myself, I have nothing but the deepest respect for anyone who has the skills to be a court recorder. If you ever get the chance to check one of these machines out, or to type on it, I highly recommend you take it.

Keyboards

I'm thinking about keyboards.

Many of you have probably heard about the design of the QWERTY keyboard. It was designed by trial and error by a man trying to minimize jamming of metal type arms on the machine he was using - essentially, to make typing slow, and to keep commonly used keys as far from one another as possible. One of many historical examples of necessity trumping our desire for a design of optimal efficiency.

The Dvorak keyboard, by contrast, was designed for ease of use - but it never really caught on, because the QWERTY was already so well-established. Somewhere out there is a land of alternative technologies we all missed out on by chance: the clocks that turn counter-clockwise, the betamax video recorders, the Dvorak keyboards... Mind you, there are those who use the Dvorak keyboard even now, but it's pretty clear who the winner was. I'm so accustomed to the QWERTY by now that I have a devil of a time with the alphabetically ordered key-sets that are often used on children's video games to type in the child's name.

I learned to type by taking a class when I was twelve. I remember at the time that my brother, who was just over a year younger, fudged his age to twelve also so he could enter the class (it was for ages 12 and up). Needless to say, he handled it just fine, and both of us can now touch-type. This is something for which I am constantly grateful (thanks, Mom!).

Now, my children are learning to use the computer. My daughter, who is not yet four, can point, click and drag the mouse, and she hunts and pecks the letters she knows (and touch-types the letters she doesn't know, in joyous profusion!). My son knows all the letters and is able to type his name, his logins and his passwords when necessary. My immediate thought?

I'd better not wait till they're twelve to teach them to type! By then it will already be far too late.

When I was living in Japan, I once had an opportunity to visit the Japanese newspaper Asahi Shimbun. One of the most fascinating things I saw there was the old keyboards they used to type the newspaper.

Oh. My. God.

First let me note that there was a big battle about restricting the number of characters that could be used in the newspaper. The final conclusion of this battle, after many years, was to fix the number of characters at just under two thousand.

Imagine this keyboard. It had to be eighteen inches square at least, with an array of big keys - each containing as many as nine characters - and a small numeric keypad in the bottom right-hand corner. For each character to be typed, the operator would have to pick the character by typing first the number of the desired character, and then hitting the key upon which that character appeared. This thing required an operator who had not only complete knowledge of the character set, but also loads of training and experience.

Nowadays, the Japanese use word processors. First, you type in the sounds you want, either by romanization or by fixed location of the syllabic character on the keyboard. Then you press the space bar, and the computer automatically brings up a list of all the possible characters that can be substituted for the sounds you've typed. All you have to do is pick the one you want, either by typing the number beside it or by scrolling down to it and hitting return. This is a real help, but at the same time it has made it so easy to pick the correct character, that often Japanese young people are able to recognize characters without actually being able to write them from memory.

I think it's really interesting how technological changes can affect behavior.

Now, imagine the technology of your fantasy or science fiction world. If you have a created language, the appearance of script is going to depend a lot on what kind of technology is used for writing. A keyboard has certain kinds of restrictions. It doesn't lend itself well to cursive - but on the other hand, if it is connected to a computer rather than to a piece of metal type, it can have more flexibility. I think it would be safe to guess that Arabic word processors are able to provide the correct form of the character - word-initial, word-medial, or word-final - simply by computer logic. The way that a keyboard works will influence the way that people conceptualize their alphabet and their literacy. Type generally implies the common availability of text, for example.

It's getting late, so I'll leave you all at this point to theorize about how to use this further. Let me just say this: type might be under the radar, or seem unimportant - but it might just provide a pungent detail to make your alien world and language seem more real.