Poorly motivated changes of the positioning of „“ and <> in the Bulgarian Phonetic layout
Hello,
First I'd like to thank @svu and @whot for their decades-long support of XKB among many other projects.
I recently updated to Fedora 33 and was surprised by the disappearance of the German-style (which I will now call Bulgarian) quotation marks from the AB08 and AB09 keys in the Bulgarian Phonetic layout.
After looking into the issue, I tracked it down to #203 (closed) and respectively !52 (merged). Later changed once again with !115 (merged) after @dimitar.dimitrov and @smarnv noticed the regression.
In the scarce motives for the code change, @mapmoeu states the following:
It is very annoying because when a user needs to type '>' he needs to switch to English US or another language that has these very common symbols
I would like to put the statement above in contrast to the description of the code change that initially introduced[1][2] Bulgarian quotation marks in Bulgarian Phonetic. For some more context, Anton Zinoviev, its author, is AFAIK one of the people credited with the development of the proposed BDS 5237-2006 standard for Bulgarian keyboard layouts please see clarification in response. At the time he was part of the Linguistic Modelling Laboratory at the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences.
I propose !52 (merged) and !115 (merged) be reverted because:
-
The
<
and>
symbols are very very rarely used in Bulgarian text. For example, they are completely absent from the BDS 5237:1978 keyboard layout, which was based on statistical analysis of Bulgarian texts. Not much has changed since then -- currently the<
and>
symbols are predominantly used in scientific and programming context, both of which require switching to a Latin layout either before typing them, or immediately after (for example for typingax + b > 0
, or<div></div>
). This means they are dead and useless symbols when put in the context of Bulgarian text. -
Quotation marks are extensively used throughout Bulgarian text. For example in a completely random Bulgarian article there are 24 occurrences of quotation marks.
-
The initial change from
<
and>
to„
and“
for Bulgarian Phonetic, proposed by Anton Zinoviev, has even more good motives behind it. Translation follows:- From Anton Zinoviev's article Bulgarian keyboard layouts for GNU/Linux:
... there are keys that generate symbols of little importance (TN: for Bulgarian) like @, #, ^, &, *, _, < and >. This gives us a reserve of free keyboard positions which we can use for more useful symbols, e.g. the Numero sign (№). ... Out of the free symbols of the traditional phonetic keyboard, only the < and > symbols show direction. This is why those symbols are the most natural place for the Bulgarian quotation marks („ “).
- From the description of the initial change:
Similarly to this I updated the non-letter symbols in the traditional phonetic layout to be the same as the symbols in the new phonetic layout. These changes affect only symbols that are not used while the keyboard is in Cyrillic mode so I think nobody will need the old variant of the traditional phonetic layout.
- From the motives behind the proposed BDS 5237-2006:
We have to add the symbols €, №, §, long dash and opening and closing Bulgarian quotation mark. The symbols will be positioned in place of the symbols ^, #, &, _, <, and >. This way the BDS and Phonetic keyboard layouts become 'equal in rights'.
To clear up the last statement, I read equal in rights as in it's similarly difficult to type Bulgarian quotation marks in both BDS and Phonetic. In BDS the quotation marks are L1 and L2 of the
\
key, and in Phonetic, L2 of the<
and>
keys.Actually having them in L3 makes the Phonetic layout inferior in BDS, which is my motive for having !115 (merged) reverted as well.
- From Anton Zinoviev's article Bulgarian keyboard layouts for GNU/Linux:
-
It will subject the users of this keyboard layout since
20062009 to a striking change, the first examples being @dimitar.dimitrov and @smarnv. -
In my subjective opinion, having the quotation marks on L2 AB08 and AB09 makes Linux superior to Windows for typing Bulgarian text and is very easy to get used to as a new user. This is something I discovered even with the original introduction of the quotation marks back in '09, after I got it in a similarly surprising fashion as their removal now.
Why the aforementioned two changes should not be reverted and the current layout retained as is:
- Having a similar experience to Windows (only with regards to the < and > symbols, as there are a bunch of other special symbols that are different from the Windows Bulgarian Phonetic (Traditional) layout).
Unfortunately as far as I know Anton Zinoviev no longer has on-line presence so we can't ask him to chime in. His official (publicly available) e-mail is anton@lml.bas.bg. Not sure if it's up to date.
@mapmoeu, @dimitar.dimitrov, @smarnv what are your opinions on this?
P.S. I found another remotely valid use for < and > in Bulgarian, within the context of on-line chat: these two old-school ASCII emoticons >:) :>.