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The Shwa Keyboard | Contents |
I have described the Shwa script as a universal writing system, but of course it's actually a reading system. But Shwa also has a universal writing system, a standard keyboard so that you can enter text wherever you go. If you've ever tried to write French or German using an English keyboard, for instance, you understand the advantage.
The Shwa keypad has only 20 keys, about the same as the keypad on your phone or a calculator :
Obviously, if we're going to enter all the Shwa letters we need more than 20 keys. There is a simple trick: we spell each letter using two keys: a keypair. To enter a character, first you press the key for the top of the letter, then the key for the bottom of the letter.
The keys are marked with the vowels, and sometimes it isn't obvious what the corresponding consonants are, so here's a cheat sheet :
Not all of the bottoms are used for Shwa letters, and several more are only used for one semivowel. Notice that the bottoms in the middle row are reflected: the shapes that open to the side should be considered to open on either side.
The Dot is used when the top or bottom is missing:
So for example, if you wanted to type the word Shwa, which looks like this: 
, on a
keypad, you'd enter these keys :
The Diamond is typed with a special combination:
Most of you will use a Shwa virtual keypad, which pops up on your screen when you need to enter Shwa. One big advantage is that the key legends reflect the current mode and state. So, for instance, if you have already typed the key with the upside-down cup (the ah vowel) to indicate the top of a letter, the keypad would look like this :
Most of the time, there's a sixth row of keys on top of the Shwa keypad. These four keys don't correspond to Shwa letters, so they're not technically part of the Shwa keyboard, But they control how the Shwa keyboard works.
The Undo (or Backspace) key undoes the last action you did. If the last key you pressed was a top, it will undo it and wait for another top. If the last key was a bottom, it will undo the whole letter and wait for a top. If you erase back to the word before, it will start undoing words, and so forth.
The Shift (or Caps) key changes the keyboard Mode - we'll describe how that works below.
The Exit (or Escape) key interrupts the current operation and asks for attention from the operating system. You may or may not lose your text in progress.
The Enter (or Return) key says you're finished typing, at least this bit, and now it's the turn of your application or
correspondent to react.
These four keys normally show on top of the Shwa keypad.
The single keypad above is great for mobile phones, where you're only using one hand. But Shwa keyboards for computers - where both hands are free - usually use a double keypad - it looks like this (I've hidden the key legends on the right side for now):
To use the double keypad, you press the the key for the top of the letter on the left with your left hand and the key for the bottom of the letter on the right with your right hand. The keys on the right are in the same positions as they are on the left. The two keys can be pressed in either order, or one can be held down while the other is pressed, so it's faster than the single version.
To type the word Shwa on the double keypad, you'd enter these keys :
It's also possible to produce large keyboards with one key for each letter needed for one language, just like we have now. They make typing faster, but aren't universal (like current keyboards). One can imagine a single large keyboard with all the characters in the set - that would be universal (and big!).
No keyboard has enough keys for everything we might want to type, so most keyboards use tricks to give each key multiple meanings. For example, a typical computer keyboard has a Shift key, a Control key, an Alt key, and maybe even an Alt-Gr key, a Function key or another special key. All these keys change the meanings of other keys when you hold them down.
Shwa keyboards avoid these shifty keys in favor of keypad modes. A mode assigns a meaning to each key, and that key keeps that meaning until you change modes. There is a mode for each Shwa gait, but there's also a mode for cursor keys, modes for numbers and mathematics, and sometimes even modes for traditional scripts like the Latin alphabet. A program might use a mode to assign common commands to the keys; for example, a music program might use the Shwa keypad as a piano keyboard.
The key to shifting between all these modes is the Shift key, which looks like this:
You press the Shift key to indicate that you want to shift modes. Here's what a typical virtual keyboard would then look like:
You then indicate which mode you want to shift to by pressing another key. The keyboard stays in that mode until you select a new mode.
Note that each mode also has an icon. This icon might appear at the bottom of your screen to show you which mode you're in. For keypair modes, these icons change color when you've typed the top of a letter to indicate that the keypad is waiting for the bottom.
We won't go over all the modes here, but we'll mention that the four gaits are assigned to the bottom four keys in the squares column, as follows :
So to shift into Abjad gait, you would press the Shift key, then the Abjad mode key. The keypad stays in Abjad gait, in letter mode, alternating between tops and bottoms, until you press Shift again.
The top key in the second column is the Shwa key, which puts you in letter mode without changing the gait.
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