Extremaduran/keyboard

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Existing Resources

Keyboard layouts

Tavultesoft Extremaduran keyboard This keyboard seems to support many special characters not required for Extremeduran. This lends it utility as a multilingual keyboard, which is beneficial given that Spanish is the dominant language in and around most of the region in which Extremeduran is common. It also means that the keyboard is more complicated than it needs to be and that the Extremaduran special characters are not as easily accessible as they could be.

Existing resources

While Extremaduran is similar enough to Spanish that a standard Latin keyboard could be used to communicate effectively in it, we found in our background research that diacriticals exist in Extremaduran that are not part of the standard Latin keyboard, and decided to modify the Latin keyboard to support them. Oueasoning to pursue this course of action rather than be content with using a standard Latin keyboard, or the above keyboard that supports Extremaduran, is that an Extremaduran keyboard not only has the potential to be an effective tool for us over the course of the semester, but could also come in handy to anyone doing long-form Extremaduran writing in the future.

Created Keyboard

The Extremaduran keyboard we have created is based on the basic Latin prefix Keyboard. We removed the existing dot operator effects and encoded the lower dot diacritical needed to effectively type Extremaduran.


~
`
◌̀
!
1

¡
@
2

#
3

$
4

%
5

^
6

&
7

*
8

(
9

)
0

_
-

+
=

       
Q
q

W
w

E
e

R
r

T
t

Y
y

U
u

I
i

O
o

P
p

{
[

}
]

|
\

        
A
a

S
s

D
d

F
f

G
g

H
h

J
j

K
k

L
l

:
;

"
'
◌̈
◌́
           
Z
z

X
x

C
c
Ç
ç
V
v

B
b

N
n
Ñ
ñ
M
m

<
,

>
.

◌̣
?
/

¿


The existing apostrophe dead key combines with "c" specially to produce the c-cedilla character "ç", which is used in Extremaduran.

Justification

We chose to modify the Latin prefix layout because of its already existing capacity to support languages with heavy diacritical usage like Extremaduran. One consideration we took into account was the challenge of words like "s’escuendi" with mid-word punctuation, and whether a pre- or post-fix Latin layout would be more convenient to use when typing these words. However, we ultimately decided to use the pre-fix layout because both layouts provide roughly equal levels of inconvenience in that consideration, but pre-fix provided more convenience in general usage. As part of our project, we also created a keyboard layout to transcribe the IPA sounds that exist in Extremaduran, which makes changes such as automatically replacing "d", a sound not technically present in Extremaduran, with the more accurate "d̼".

Installation

  1. Clone repository to your local machine: git clone git@github.swarthmore.edu:mparker3/ling073-ext-keyboard.git
  2. cd into repository
  3. If you do not already have a directory ~/.m17n.d, make it.
  4. cp ext.mim ~/.m17n.d
  5. Switch to IBus as keyboard input method if not already in use, open "Preferences", and add "Extremaduran" from the "Other" section as a keyboard layout.

The keyboard layout is licensed under the MIT License.