I use phonetic layouts for typing Greek in particular, but I want one for Hebrew and one for Kyrillic as well.
The great benefit of phonetic layouts is that you don't have to relearn a lot to type other scripts. If I want to type a greek_tau I want it to be on the same key as my T is. Same with the Hebrew Tav or the Kyrillic тэ. That much is simple enough.
Of course some modifications must be made since for instance Greek lacks some latin letters but has its own peculiarities like ksi and psi. (Theta, on a side note, isn't peculiar - it's English that's to blame for losing its th letter 'þorn' long ago while the sound is still in use!) These should be placed as logical as possible to the latin-letter user.
For a native Russian for instance, it's more of a toss-up whether to make your own ergonomic layout based on your language or to use a phonetic Kyrillic Colemak layout. For one, the former would be a lot of work and has yet to be done well to my knowledge! And then there's the question of multilinguicity. I'm Norwegian but type at least as much English as Norwegian in a typical day! For me Colemak is the logical layout choice because it's not bad for Norwegian (my locale variant has the æøå letters of course) and it's really good for English. For our Russian friend it may be on the whole easier to have a Colemak setup on both Kyrillic and Latin typing if he/she has to switch back and forth a lot!
Oh, and do you remember the old topic by Checkit and others discussing the virtues of Colemak for international typing? I don't know about Slavic languages, but for the other European languages it seems to do surprisingly well!
Last edited by DreymaR (25-Jul-2012 08:16:26)