The Russian QWERTY keyboard
Typing Cyrillic on a QWERTY keyboard can be confusing for someone who mostly types in English. The keyboard layout can help or hinder. Since I only very occasionally type in Russian (and even less frequently in Ukrainian or Mongolian), no one should think any less of me for using a keyboard layout for Cyrillic that an actual Russian person would not use.
I was watching an old Russian movie, Alexander Nevsky, when I noticed that one of the text cards at the beginning had a translation that seemed a little off.
СЛЕДЫ ЖЕСТОКИХ СРАЖЕНИЙ ЕЩЕ ВИДНЕЛИСЬ ПО ВСЕЙ СТРАНЕ
Traces of the sanguine battles were everywhere
“Sanguine battles”? Don’t you mean “bloody battles”? I put it in Google Translate and it said “fierce battles,” which probably would not have caught my attention if that had been what the movie subtitles used.
In order to put that into Google Translate, I had to type it. Or maybe I could have just pointed my phone at the screen. But… I went with typing.
Here’s what I get from the Russian keyboard layout in Windows 10:
йцукенгшщзхъ\
QWERTYUIOP[]\
фывапролджэ
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ASDFGHJKL;’
ячсмитьбю.
ZXCVBNM,./
First thing that jumps out at me here is that the A key is mapped to ф, the one that looks like the Greek letter phi. That’s mapping a vowel key to a consonant.
On macOS, we get a couple more choices for Russian keyboards. I chose Russian QWERTY because I figured it would for the most part map the Roman letters to the Cyrillic letters closest in sound. And that’s indeed the case.
яшертыуиопюжэ
QWERTYUIOP[]\
асдфгчйкл;’
ASDFGHJKL;’
зхцвбнм,./
ZXCVBNM,./
I immediately noticed that the S key is mapped to Cyrillic С, rather than to the C key. This makes a lot of sense to me, since, as far as I know, Cyrillic С always has an S sound. If you mostly type in English and you know the sounds of enough of the Cyrillic letters, you might find the Russian QWERTY keyboard layout more amenable to the occasional typing of brief passages in Russian.
