Standardization of Computer Codes and Keyboards for Cyrillic: 2

American Association of Teachers of Slavic and East European Languages

Standardization of Computer Codes and Keyboards for Cyrillic: 2Author(s): Barry ScherrSource: The Slavic and East European Journal, Vol. 31, No. 1 (Spring, 1987), pp. 95-99Published by: American Association of Teachers of Slavic and East European LanguagesStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/307017 .

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STANDARDIZATION OF COMPUTER CODES AND KEYBOARDS FOR CYRILLIC: 2

Barry Scherr, Dartmouth College

As chair of AATSEEL's Ad Hoc Committee on Standardization of Com- puter Keyboards for Cyrillic, I welcome the opportunity to reply to David Moffat's alternate proposals. For several reasons I think his comments are quite useful.

First, they point to several areas in which the Committee perhaps should have been more complete in explaining both the rationale behind its decisions and the process by which those decisions were reached.

Second, they provide something that was largely missing from our deliberations despite an effort on our part to obtain it-the informed viewpoint of somebody who knows Russian but whose professional background is more in computing. I am not sure that our final decisions at the time would have been different, but at the very least we would have made more of an effort to address some of the concerns that Moffat has expressed.

Third, his comments illustrate the rapid developments in the world of computing since the Committee's first deliberations. The Committee began to meet in December 1983, and its report, except for a few minor revisions, was drafted the following summer. In those days the MacintoshTM was a very new product, only a handful of Slavists owned or even used computers, and specialized software for Cyrillic was, for the most part, still being devel- oped. During our considerations we understood that we were in the midst, rather than at the end, of a major technological revolution, and thus we were careful to note that our report was more of an interim measure than a "final word" (84). The Committee recognized that at some point in the not too distant future it would be necessary to return to the report in order to complete work on several matters left undone and also to consider whether revisions in the basic recommendations were necessary. A mechanism for doing so now exists, and I shall turn to this matter again at the end of my reply.

It might be appropriate at the outset to say a word about the Committee's method of work. Members of AATSEEL who were known to have some

SEEJ, Vol. 31, No. 1 (1987) 95



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interest in or experience with computers were invited to join the Committee, which held an organizational meeting at the December 1983 convention. Notices about the Committee's work were placed in the "AATSEEL News- letter," and all those who replied were then kept informed of progress on the report. The proposals that various Committee members had submitted were then re-examined in light of comments and suggestions received from others, and the resulting rough draft was circulated among approximately forty individuals-the members of the Committee along with those who had written to the Committee in regard to our work. The replies to the draft were taken into consideration when the report was reworked into a semi-final version, which was itself sent out early in the fall of 1984. Only a few more changes were made for the final report, which was officially submitted at the 1984 AATSEEL Convention. Thus all those who had any interest in the Committee's work had the opportunity to make their views known, and the Committee-rather than forcing the views of any one per- son or small group on the rest of AATSEEL-attempted to come up with a set of proposals that would be acceptable to the profession as a whole.

This approach may help explain why the Committee used words such as "practicality" and "compromise" (85) to describe its approach, while Moffat talks in terms of anachronisms and ethnocentricity. Hence, the recommendations for four different keyboards, no one of which exactly matches the Soviet layout. Several issues are involved here, and I shall try to address each in turn.

First, there is the question of considering typewriters at all when discuss- ing a set of recommendations for computers. Here the Committee felt that much of the work in Cyrillic would continue to be done on typewriters for some time to come and that it was best to arrive at a proposal that would allow people to switch between the two types of keyboards with a minimum of difficulty. Speaking for myself, I have recently come to feel that within a few years this concern may well become less significant. The tendency among my acquaintances who have begun to use personal computers during the past year or two has been to entirely abandon typewriters for Cyrillic. Now that the hardware has become more affordable, people are likely to own their own computer, rather than rely on a departmental or college- owned computer for large jobs and a typewriter for small ones. In the meantime, though, the majority of people in the field do not yet own (and in many cases have not even used) a computer, so that the existence of a keyboard standard which closely follows typewriter layouts may still serve the function of easing the crossover from one kind of equipment to the other. Indeed, many are sufficiently intimidated by computers that a Cyrillic layout different from that on their familiar typewriters would make them more reluctant to change.



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Second, the suggestion for both 44-key and 47-key layouts for the standard and student keyboards was based on the practical experience of those who were already using Cyrillic, whether for computer assisted instruction or for word processing. At that time most individuals had designed their own keyboards, and while differences among what we came to designate standard and student keyboard were not great, it soon became clear that most people had used a 44- or 45-key layout for characters and signs or a layout with 46, 47, or 48 keys. The numbers we selected, therefore, were based on current usage, and it was felt that consolidating all the various layouts we had seen into just four possible layouts was in and of itself an accomplishment. Furthermore, as noted in the report, the 44- and 47-key layouts are in each case closely related, so that going from one to the other should not present great difficulties. The main problem, of course, is that there are still two main types: the standard and the student. I have seen nothing in the past two years that would lead me to conclude that we can readily get down to a single recommendation. The standard board remains the choice for word processing and should be adopted by all those who already know Russian. However, for the purposes of computer assisted instruction, particularly at the elementary level, many are still convinced that a transliteration system makes the most sense.

Third, our placement of numbers and characters for the standard board differs from the Soviet layout. Most notably, numbers are lower case (as on English typewriters), and the characters are not necessarily on the same keys as on Soviet typewriters. The Committee discussed this matter at length and concluded that this placement (1) allowed for greater similarity between the standard and student boards and (2) would not be all that great a hindrance for those who had used (or would use) Soviet typewriters as well. In general, Soviet typewriters tend to lack some useful signs, such as the semicolon and the acute accent (which all four recommended layouts include) as well as Soviet quotation marks (<<, o), which can be found on both the 47-key layouts. The effort to include these signs forced us to move others around somewhat, but the layout for the letters does follow that found on Soviet typewriters.

Another set of questions concerns the ASCII codes. Here I would like to make just two points.

First, Moffat states that "current Soviet ASCII codes are not shown in the report." In fact, as is noted in the report (86) columns 12 through 15 of the chart in appendix 2 do reproduce the current Soviet code, which for some reason follows English rather than Cyrillic alphabetical order (clearly, the Soviet code was not designed with word processing in mind). This order was not, then, offered as a whim on the part of the Committee but was suggested by current Soviet practice (and hence represents one way in which



98 Slavic and East European Journal

the Committee tried to avoid ethnocentricity). To be sure, the chart in appendix 2 does lack some Russian signs, but that is because the Soviets themselves have not included them.

Second, the relationship between the codes as presented in appendices 1 and 2 is by no means arbitrary. Appendix 1 was included only because many of the smaller home computers (which will probably become obsolete in a few more years) were limited to dealing with characters expressed by 7 bits, or a total of 128 characters (2 raised to the 7th power). For the sake of those machines, a Cyrillic ASCII code was superimposed on the standard ASCII code. Today virtually all computers allow for 8-bit characters (or up to 256). While the table in appendix 2 may not be all that easy to read, the distance between Cyrillic characters in the two appendices is always exactly 128 (e.g., Cyrillic C is 115 in appendix 1 and 243 in appendix 2 [expressed as 11110011 in binary]). Thus the two sets are not "wildly different" but purposefully designed so that translating from one code to the other is quite easy.

Still, as I noted at the beginning, I do not want to defend every aspect of the report as offering an ideal solution to the problems that the Committee considered, nor do I want to suggest that certain of Moffat's suggestions are without merit. His own proposal for two quite different ASCII codes is one that I find intriguing, though I would certainly want to consider it at some length before making a firm recommendation. Essentially he suggests that we keep the Soviet code (i.e., appendix 2) for the interchange of information, but adopt a totally different set for word processing. His own assignment of values, in which capital letters are next to small letters, and all letters follow the order of the Cyrillic alphabet, would certainly make word processing programs much simpler to write. Note, for instance, that in standard ASCII even English causes a problem, since small letters have a decimal value that is 32 higher than capitals; it is necessary for English word processing programs to include a routine that adds 32 to any capitals in order to alphabetize texts that include both capital and small letters. A word processing program using text that follows the Soviet code would require a routine to reassign values to all the letters so that the computer could alphabetize them (a computer alphabetizes by putting letters into order based on the numerical values assigned to them; thus A with a value of 65 comes before B, which is given a value of 66 in ASCII code). Again, I am not sure whether this suggestion should be adopted, but it is certainly worth considering.

Less controversial are Moffat's remarks concerning the absence of stressed vowels and other special symbols, as well as the lack of direct support for graphics or typesetting codes. The newer computers could all easily handle these in addition to the Cyrillic alphabet, and a specific set of recommendations regarding such characters should be made. Also, as Moffat notes, the



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East European languages other than Russian were dealt with rather hastily in our report, and it is perhaps time to consider those more carefully.

During the summer of 1986 AATSEEL reconstituted an Educational Technology Committee, which I have been asked to chair. As one of its first items of business the group will look once again at the original report as well as at the alternate proposals suggested by David Moffat. At the time of this writing it is too early to say what if any changes will be recommended; however, announcements of the Educational Technology Committee's work will appear regularly in the "AATSEEL Newsletter," and those with an interest in this or any other aspect of its concerns (which, as the name suggests, will not be limited just to computers), should feel free to contact me directly.

WORK CITED

Scherr, Barry. "Final Report: Ad Hoc Committee on Standardization of Computer Keyboards for Cyrillic." SEEJ 29, no. 1 (1985): 84-95.



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Standardization of Computer Codes and Keyboards for Cyrillic: 2