Look at the English Q·W·E·R·T·Y layout above, and it will appear random. But from looking at the other typewriter, you can learn a great deal about Turkish. As I’m typing this article in English, my right pointing finger rests on j, which is very rarely in use (it accounts for only half a percent of letters). No such waste in Turkish; every key under your finger will be one of the most common letters.

2.

Accented characters aren’t always second-class citizens

For a small taste of Turkish, here’s that language’s most popular pangram:

Pijamalı hasta, yağız şoföre çabucak güvendi.

(Pangrams are short, surreal sentences that contain all the characters in a given alphabet. The above means “the patient in pajamas quickly trusted the swarthy driver.” The popular English equivalent is The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog, containing all 26 English alphabet letters with little waste.)

With some exceptions (Greek, Russian, etc.), most European alphabets descended from Roman/Latin. They differ from English, though, in that they employ extra characters — usually the same as English letters, but with extra “decoration.” Some, for example Spanish, only need an extra ñ. Others, like Czech, come armed with an entire battery of new letters — in this case á č ď é ě í ň ó ř š ť ú ů ž — to express themselves fully.

It’s easy to dismiss those extra letters as unimportant and secondary. On typewriters or computer keyboards, they are often relegated to modifier keys (hold Alt+A together to type in å), or dead keys (press ` and then a to get à), even though they are often more common and deserve more prominence.

That’s not the case here. In Turkish, for example, ü and ş are more commonly used than c and v and p. People creating this keyboard layout knew that, and so characters unique to Turkish get prominent placing on first-class keys, right alongside the Roman letters.

Both of these two points — rejecting Q·W·E·R·T·Y and elevating the extra letters — are very powerful. To me, this keyboard says “we’re proud of our language and we will treat it with respect.”

3.

Each language has a crazy secret

In English and many other languages, there’s an i that, when capitalized, becomes an I.

But in Turkish, i gets capitalized to… İ, its tittle still there. But I exists also! And its lowercase form is, you guessed it… ı. Dotted i and dotless ı coexist in perfect harmony, and both have separate keys on the keyboard: