Central Kurdish/Keyboard

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Revision as of 20:05, 25 February 2021 by Rkamal1 (talk | contribs) (→‎Background)

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Background

The Persian-based orthography for Sorani Kurdish has 33 letters. It has most of these in common with both Farsi and Arabic scripts, which are two dominant languages in most regions where Sorani is spoken. There are an additional 14 letters in Arabic that do not exist in the Sorani script; adding these letters gives us a Sorani keyboard that can double up as an Arabic one (or even a Sorani one!).

A 47-letter keyboard seems daunting. The good news is that neither Sorani nor Arabic orthographies have uppercase and lowercase, so just using shift we can type 52 letters. Second, the additional Arabic letters look similar to corresponding Sorani letters, so in terms of user experience it will be more or less intuitive where each additional letter goes.

Because of these two points, most currently-existing keyboards developed for Sorani have aimed at marrying the two orthographies. They are not without their problems, though, so here I will try to develop a better version of an Arabo-Sorani keyboard. More ambitiously, I will try to see if it is possible to implement a usable Farso-Arabo-Sorani keyboard.

Existing Resources

Branah Layout