Russian keyboards

[Don Livingston]

Dear Colleagues,

I'd like to weigh in on the homophonic keyboard versus fyva keyboard
dicussion in regards to teaching English-speaking students who already
touch-type using a standard US keyboard.  The argument for the fyva keyboard
has been phrased to me several times like this:  "If students end up in
Russia having to type on someone else's computer, or end up working in a
Russian office, then they will be at a disadvantage because they won't know
the Russian standard."  In response:

1.  Essentially all keyboards sold in Russia have both the Latin and Russian
characters printed on the keys.  Students will have no trouble finding the
Russian letters on a Russian keyboard in Russia.

2.  I first learned to type in Russian in the 80s using a keyboard that
followed the AATSEEL student keyboard letter positions.  Since I could
already touch-type in English, the similar sound/position correspondence of
the homophonic keyboard allowed me to type in Russian at forty words a
minute within a month's time with a minimum of practice.  That kind of
immediate productivity is pedagogically valuable.

3.  The vast majority of our Russian students will never work in a Russian
office nor find themselves in a position where they need to rapidly type on
a fyva keyboard to prevent catastrophe.  Since that is the case, it seems
sensible to me to give the students an option that maximizes their
productivity as quickly as possible.

I require that my students be able to type in Russian for online activities.
 Whether they use a homophonic or fyva keyboards is entirely up to them, but
I guarantee you that the touch-typists among them will be more productive
more quickly using a homophonic one.

Finally I'd like to respond to Phillipe Frison's comment:  "One of this list
members puzzled me a couple of years ago, starting writing English in
cyrillic letters as I had started to do it "to make things simpler", and I
realized how much typing Russian in Latin characters has something to do
with a sort of "colonial" approach of the Russian culture..."

There is a bit of history and technology you might not be aware of.  The old
SEELANGS reference card (which might not be available anymore) stated
specifically that one should not use Cyrillic characters when addressing the
list.  The problem was technological:  old mail servers often could not deal
with 8-bit characters, so if you sent Russian, your readers could receive
gobbledegook.  Russian letters were often stripped out or replaced by some
other character.  There is still a technological issue.  Currently there are
three different encodings commonly used to code Russian on the web (KOI8-R,
Windows 1251, and UTF-8).  If you send a note to the list that includes
Russian characters, and the SEELANGS recipient has set up an account to
receive posts in digest format, then those Russian characters will be
transformed into illegible glop in the digest.  I post a sample from one of
today's digests here
(http://shininghappypeople.net/doc/seelangs-gobbledegook.html) so you may
evaluate the severity of the problem.  The solution to this problem,
eventually, would be to transfer the list to a UTF-8 compatible system, but
that is no small task.

In conclusion, if you wish to maximize your effectiveness in communicating
to the readers of this list, then latinizing your Cyrillic characters is
very sensible.

All the best, Don Livingston.

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