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Kanuri and Hausa Keyboards, part 2
Thanks to the comments on my previous blog entry about Hausa and Kanuri keyboard layouts, I’ve looked into the topic a little more, adding yet more options for typing.
Dead keys: the keyboard may have “dead keys” for accents. A dead key does not print anything when pressed, but combines with whatever you type next. For instance, you could have a dead accent acute key that combines with a, so you hit dead-acute followed by a and get á. In Kubuntu 9.04 (which is the OS I have at hand during this trip, so some of the advice offered in comments previously doesn’t apply) dead-acute k combines to ḱ. But this does offer a possible solution: using dead-acute with b, d, k, r and e. These will produce the Hausa b, d and k with a hook and the Kanuri r with a line and upside-down e.
First, I had to find a key on my keyboard to define as dead-acute, since I don’t have one otherwise. I used the strange key squashed between enter and the arrow keys, keycode 94.
xmodmap -e "keycode 94 = dead_acute"
From then, I could immediately use the dead-acute key for combinations that are already defined in X, like á, é, ń and others. But it doesn’t help me type Hausa all that much.
Next stop, .Xcompose. This is a file I create in my home directory. Reading it in seems to require an X restart, so log out and log in after creating the file. You will note that it uses the new dead-acute key to create all of the Hausa and Kanuri and the Naira symbol out of existing keys. The Naira is already pre-defined as multi-N-equals, but that is equally hard to type.
So I put this into my .XCompose. It takes the current configuration and then adds the dead-acute key combinations just described. Of course this is no official keyboard layout, but it may help some people type Hausa at speed when no other keyboard is available.
# Import default rules from the system Compose file:
include "/usr/share/X11/locale/en_US.UTF-8/Compose"
# Hausa definitions
<dead_acute> <k> : "ƙ" U0199 # HAUSA k
<dead_acute> <K> : "Ƙ" U0198 # HAUSA K
<dead_acute> <b> : "ɓ" U0253 # HAUSA b
<dead_acute> <B> : "Ɓ" U0181 # HAUSA B
<dead_acute> <d> : "ɗ" U0257 # HAUSA d
<dead_acute> <D> : "Ɗ" U018A # HAUSA D
<dead_acute> <e> : "ə" schwa # KANURI e
<dead_acute> <E> : "Ə" SCHWA # KANURI E
<dead_acute> <r> : "ɍ" U024D # KANURI r
<dead_acute> <R> : "Ɍ" U024C # KANURI R
<dead_acute> <n> : "₦" U20a6 # NAIRA SIGN
<dead_acute> <N> : "₦" U20a6 # NAIRA SIGN
I think an advantage of a dead-key approach is that you don’t have to hold anything down and the symbols on the keyboard still resemble what you’re typing. Of course, getting a dead-acute key to stick across sessions is the next issue to deal with, or perhaps I should set up something like super instead (that can be done with the KDE keyboard layout tool) so that super-b is ɓ.
In any case, it goes to show that there’s many ways to do it — whatever it is. In the end the KDE UserBase Compose Key tutorial has been vaguely helpful, but mostly the links at the bottom of that page.
[[ One might wonder why I’m blogging this kind of thing, but that’s because I promised some people here in Kano that I would look some things up for them, and the most effective way to get the information back to them — and back to their students — is to bung it on the internet, so that searching for Nigerian keyboard layouts for Hausa turns this information up (as well as useful things like the OLPC layout). ]]
Tags: hausa, keyboard, localization