An hypothesis of keyboard layout remapping to type Etruscan
Articolo disponibile anche in italiano.
After seeing how comfortable is typing Etruscan with TEVU, you may wonder if that could be done also with a real computer keyboard. And the answer is yes.
It is a question of creating a new keyboard layout where every Latin character relates to its Etruscan correspondent in the Unicode Old Italic block (see what I have already written about it).
Here I am just putting down the guidelines to have the most intuitive and logical mapping, such as the one in the image I have drawn in this page.
For practical reasons I have started from an Italian QWERTY layout, but the idea is applicable to any, as we are going to remap only clean letters (A-Z) and numbers (0-9), leaving apart characters with accents, diacritics and punctuation.
As stated above, we will keep the phonetic correspondence between Latin and Etruscan graphemes.
As there is no evidence of a distinction between capital and small letters in the Etruscan epigraphs, our work is going to be simpler: we will just remap lower case characters.
We will use only the capitals of [t] and [p] for their respective aspirates [th / θ] and [ph / φ]; the capitals of [c] and [k] for their shared aspirate [ch / kh / χ]; the capital of [s] for its graphical variant [sh / ś / σ / whatever other transliteration used by different Etruscology schools]; the capital of [e] for its Etruscan backwards correspondent.
With reference to numbers, we are going to remap [1] and [5] for their Etruscan correspondents; the "capitals" of [1] and [5] for the respective Etruscan graphemes indicating 10 and 50; [0] for the grapheme indicating 100.
The middle dot [·], which is used in several epigraphs, is already available on the keyboard (on the Italian QWERTY, for example, you have to press [ALT-GR]+[.]), so we might also leave it at its place.
Should you feel like trying and have success, thank you in advance for letting me know.