[A12n-Collab] Re: [PALNet-general] Utilities for analyzing keyboards?

["Andrew Cunningham" <andrewc@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Don,
 
 your second tool would necessitate having a large corpus
in each language to use for the analysis. 
 
 as a quick
experiment, i thought I'd look at some character frequencies in a single
text, just an experiment, since a single text couldn't be considered
adequate for a proper analysis.

Since the draft Yoruba keyboard
layout uses combining diacritics for all the diacritics, I took the Yoruba
translation of the UDHR. Then normalised the text using NFD. I then ran it
through a script to count the occurrence of each character.

Of
the four most frequent characters, three were the combining diacritics:
acute, grave and dot-below. Although a single text is inconclusive, it is
suggestive that for Yoruba the combining diacritics need to be typed
frequently and should be in positions allowing them to be typed easily and
quickly.

And yes, i converted the vertical line below to a dot
below before running the test on the UDHR translation.

Andrew
-- 
Andrew Cunningham
Research and Development
Coordinator
Vicnet
State Library of Victoria
Australia

andrewc@xxxxxxxxxxxxx