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Comment by elevatortrim | Hacker News Reader

Not sure about this. For this to work, one of these would need to happen:

1. Have two "i" characters on Turkish keyboards, one to use when writing in English, one in Turkish. Sounds difficult to get used to. Always need to be conscious about whether writing an "English i", or a "Turkish i".

2. "i" key is interpreted as English "i" when in English locale, as a special unicode character when in Turkish locale. This would be a nightmare as you would then always have to be conscious of your locale. Writing in English? Switch to English locale. Writing code? Switch to English locale. Writing a Turkish string literal in code? Switch to Turkish, then switch back. It would need to be a constant switching between back and forth even though both are Latin alphabet.

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> "i" key is interpreted as English "i" when in English locale, as a special unicode character when in Turkish locale. This would be a nightmare as you would then always have to be conscious of your locale.

Isn’t this already the case with other languages? For instance, the same key on the keyboard produces a semicolon (;) in English and a Greek question mark (;) in Greek. These are distinct characters that are rendered the same (and also an easy way to troll a developer who uses an editor that doesn’t highlight non-ASCII confusables).

Not only that, but this is already the case with "i" specifically. Cyrillic "і" is different from Latin "i", and it's also located in a different place on the keyboard in the corresponding layouts.

> 1. Have two "i" characters on Turkish keyboards, one to use when writing in English, one in Turkish. Sounds difficult to get used to. Always need to be conscious about whether writing an "English i", or a "Turkish i".

But you have to do that anyway to be able to produce the correct capitalized version: an "English I" or a "Turkish İ".

No: a Turkish keyboard has separate i/İ and ı/I keys, and Türkish-writing users with an American/international keyboard use a keyboard layout with modifier keys so that the i/I key can be altered to ı/İ. (I do the latter for idiosyncratic reasons.)

The person you're replying to is pointing out that differentiating English-i from Türkish-i requires some other unwieldy workaround. Would you expect manufacturers to add a third key for English i, or for people with Turkish keyboards to use a modifier key (or locale switching) to distinguish i from i? All workarounds seem extraordinarily unlikely.

Hmm, you are kind of right but not exactly:

Yes, there are two keys, but their function is not to write the character as a "Turkish i" and an "English i". These keys are necessary because there are 4 variations, that need 2 keys to write with caps lock on and off:

Key 1 - Big and small Turkish "I": Caps Lock On: I Caps Lock Off: ı

Key 2 - Big and small Turkish "İ": Caps Lock On: İ Caps Lock Off: i

For small "Turkish i" and "English i" to be different characters, there would need to be a third key.

Ah, that's because I thought turks and azerbaijanis just switched keyboard layouts to type in english and to type in their native language.

That's a sensible thought but Turkish QWERTY keyboard includes both the English-exclusive (Q, X, W) and Turkish-exclusive characters so switching is rarely required.

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