BTW I learned a funny new thing about layouts yesterday.
You know how Vietnamese has a bunch of vowels?
aăâeêoôơuưy ? And then any of those vowels can independently be modified by a Vietnamese tone mark,
àảãáạ. (Yes, I'm typing this with a Vietnamese layout. Try it out.) So to them
ă is just a vowel unrelated to
a, but
ã is a tone-marked version of
a, and of course you can tone-mark the ones that are already written with a diacritic, so you get stuff like
ằẵỗổ. But of course, everyone knows this
What's weird is how they type them. The keys 1234[] are extra vowels. With Shift, they're capital vowels. The keys 56789 are tone marks. But it's not the accents that are dead keys, it's the vowels. Including ordinary aeiouy. So you hit A for example, and because it's a dead key it waits for you to hit an accent for it afterwards - or if you hit anything that's not an accent, it leaves it as an ordinary A and goes on. If you just hit an accent without a vowel before it, it puts in the accent as a full character of its own. But heavens forbid you want to type a Spanish name and put their precious ~ above an N, that won't do, N isn't a dead key.
Don't ask me how they type numbers. Maybe with Alt.
Bizarre, ha? I mean, I get all the key substitutions, it works for them and their alphabet. But why'd they make the vowels dead keys?
