Phonetic keyboard layout

Phonetic keyboard layout — a setup where the letters of one language correspond to the keys in the keyboard layout for another language. It assumes one-to-one correspondence between letters in the languages, based on their sound.

Phonetic layouts for Russian

For Russian, there exist two popular keyboard layouts:

• JCUKEN;
• phonetic layout, also known as "ЯВЕРТЫ" or "ЯЖЕРТЫ"

In Russian phonetic layout, the Cyrillic letters are located on the same keys as similarly sounding Latin (English) letters, for example: A-А, Б-B, В-V, Г-G, Д-D, Ф-F, K-K, O-O, and so on. This type of layout is developed by Vadim Maslov, and often is named after him.^[1] There are Russian phonetic layouts based on the QWERTY layout, and also based on other localized layouts. Russian phonetic layout is especially suited for foreigners studying Russian, and for many Russian-speaking people living outside Russia. Some types of phonetic layouts, such as "Student" and "ЯВЕРТЫ", are not only widely used by Russian-speaking people, but are recommended by American Association of Teachers of Slavic and East European Languages.^[2]

JCUKEN keyboard layout

In some countries, such as Germany, Czech Republic, Sweden there are local variants of the phonetic layout keyboard, due to the peculiarities of the local keyboard layouts. Historically, Soviet computers used the phonetic variant of the JCUKEN keyboard layout, but in some manufacture in the countries of COMECON - e.g. in the Pravets-8 model - phonetic layout for ЯВЕРТЫ/QWERTY. Currently preferred JCUKEN phonetic layout has been transferred from the typewriters to the IBM PC compatible computers.

Operating system support

A number of modern operating systems, such as Mac OS X and Linux, offer the choice of using phonetic keyboard layout for Russian instead of the default layout. In order to create a phonetic keyboard layout for Microsoft Windows, one needs a special "keyboard layout editor" software - such as a MSKLC,^[3] available for free from Microsoft. A number of ready-made layout files for Microsoft Windows are available online for Russian as well as Belarusian.

In 2010th some of the Belarusian Latin layouts gained popularity. They are using approach opposite to "ЯВЕРТЫ" ones, thus sometimes they are called "GCUKHe".

References