russian-phonetic-les
Consistent, cross-platform phonetic keyboard layout available for Windows and Mac OS
ABOUT
If you live in a country, where it’s hard to get your hand on a Cyrillic – labelled keyboard, the chances are, that you have resorted to the horrible, horrible, disgusting transliteration. Either way you wished there was a way to enter Cyrillic symbols with a keyboard, that does not contain the widespread ЙЦУКЕН scribbles on the top row. And there is. Phonetic keyboard layouts are a way to enter Cyrillic letters as if you were writing in transliterated text – with some exceptions.
WHY?
There are already a lot of phonetic keyboard layouts out there, why create another? – you may ask. First of all, it has been done for personal use. As I came to posession of a chromebook, a mac, and a windows machine, all of which were plagued by the same problem of not having cyrillic letters written on the keyboard, I decided to browse around for other methods of input and found one that suited me best in the form of AATSEEL or Student layout, which was bundled with chrome os, but was nowhere to be found on mac os/windows. I found some installers and bundles on AATSEEL website, but the key layout was different from what I grew accustomed to on a chromebook. So, I took it as a base, and made my own layout packages for mac and windows. Ta daa!
LAYOUT
The majority of the letters correspond to their counterparts by sound except for the following:
- q stands for я because it resembles it visually
- h stands for ч because it resembles it visually
- x stands for х because it looks the same
- c stands for ц because in some Baltic languages such as Latvian the roman letter is pronounced that way
The rest of letters (ё,ю,щ,ь,ъ,ж,э) must be remembered. Still easier than to learn ЙЦУКЕН by heart.
