Special Issue on 500th Anniversary of Armenian Printing

[hrant]

This topic was imported from the Typophile platform

The Armenian Weekly has kindly made their special issue on the 500th Anniversary of Armenian Printing available as a free public download:
http://www.armenianweekly.com/2012/09/24/500-anniversary-of-armenian-pri...

hhp

[J.Montalbano]

Yawn!

[J Weltin]

Thanks for sharing!

[Aleme]

Thanks a lot !

[quadibloc]

I see I failed to reply to this thread to thank you for the fascinating link, an omission I will now remedy, perhaps bringing it to the attention of some who missed it the first time.

[hrant]

John, your consideration of Armenian issues is most welcome.

hhp

[quadibloc]

Incidentally, in my search for information on the layouts of Armenian typewriters, sparked initially by a desire to illustrate another example of a phenomenon on some older Russian typewriters, I came across this news item:

http://news.am/eng/news/101637.html

I was astonished by it. In the diaspora, a keyboard with the Armenian letters arranged in something approximating the QWERTY layout makes sense; why learn to type over again just so that one can also type in Armenian? But in Armenia itself, where Armenian is the language of daily life? Was the threat of samizdat so great that Armenian typewriters were that rare, so that hardly any Armenians know how to type, and so there is no established keyboard arrangement to worry about?

Now, if they tried to copy Dvorak, that might at least lead to a decent keyboard, but to slavishly follow a foreign language to get the world's worst keyboard arrangement - it just seems sad that this can even be considered for a moment.