Looks like it. :-)

Anyways, I find my placement of the umlaut dead key really handy. It's so easy (to me at least) to hit AltGr+semicolon, especially using the Wide mod. So I find it easy enough to write German and Swedish with the standard Colemak[eD]*.

I've even taken to writing Norwegian with it. Even though it isn't optimal for my language, I find that the convenience of using vanilla Colemak[eD] and having the brackets easily accessible for coding etc outweighs the little extra effort involved in writing æøå (which, after all, I don't do all that often these days!).

Käy metsolan halki nyt retkemme tie! ^_^

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*: Edition DreymaR

Ei saa peittää, indeed! The greatness of Colemak must not be covered up! ^_^

Explanation for our non-Nordic readers: Ovens used to have warning text in all the Nordic languages. The Finnish translation of "do not cover" is "ei saa peittää", which the nerdier among us would end up remembering for life! ^_^

"Käy metsolan halki nyt retkemme tie!" is from a Finnish drinking song, and iirc it means "Forward in our forest, on our golden fields!". Finland is quite famous for forests – and drinking...

Well, it's a bit difficult to explain, as far as I remember though finnish in contrast to norwegian has differences by vowel length (Norwegian makes the difference on consonant length) and ää would be a long ä sound, which is a near-low front unrounded vowel,  which woud be similar to the sound that you'd make in chim-ae-ra I think, it's at least the one that I make when I pronounce the word :) or the first a in american affect, just dragged out a bit :)  the tt makes the t sound "strong"

It's also used in Austrian dialects like Corinthean to represent a long oa sound in some words like Leberkås (Leberkäse in Hochdeutsch) or de Klåne (der Kleine) which somehow makes sense, since the o sound from oa wandered on top of the a. I was really confused the first times that I saw that letter here in a newspaper :p

That's a lot of cool info :)

I already do that lazy thing with ø when I write in cursive I learned to write it as something between ō and ó and that stuck with me :)

in addition to all the one you mentioned there is also @ that came from ad

The ae oe, and ue that merges to become ¨ make more sense with the old Sütterling writing of german, where the e looked almost like a cursive n, which in stylized form lost it's middle connection.

Vietnamese looks kind of crazy with the tone marking and such, there we really have accent galore, would it even be possible to write it with colemak? I know for japanese, chinese, russian and korean I'm just piping it through the IME, vietnamese looks kind of interesting ;)

Interesting... so really it's a hangover from when paper was expensive!

They do present problems/inefficiencies when in comes to typing, so I'm certainly glad English hasn't got them. But the downside of not having them is inconsistent spellings.

Ideally what you'd want if you were designing an optimal language, is no accents, but each letter or combination of letters having the same sound wherever it appeared. But weirdly, even Esperanto has circumflex characters!

The price of writing was both: Parchment and vellum were both expensive, as was good ink. Educated work force, by comparison, was cheaper than now I believe, but still costly.

There's a difference between stylistic ligature – which is often handled automatically by word processors to produce prettier print – and digraphs based on ligature like æ which have taken on a special meaning. One may share SteveP's view that these special letters and accents complicate stuff needlessly, but I don't think it's that simple! I think it's useful to have a rich language in which distinctions are made between sounds. I wish English had kept its þ letter despite the advent of lead type which came from the continent without that letter. That'd led to more, not less typing efficiency! And accents are often efficient too, making it possible to compact writing.

As SteveP says, English spelling is a travesty. The ten ways of saying -ough is the worst example of this. In fact, the -ough stems from another letter/rune in old English, the Yogh. Again, German typography was lacking so they just spelled everything they couldn't write properly as '-gh' leading to this mess. ;-) Had they been a little more ahead of their time, they might've used the gamma for instance – but then the problem would've been that its minuscle looks rather like an y... which again was used instead of the þ rune (the English Thorn rune looked somewhat like an Y). This is the reason for all those "Ye Olde Pubbe" signs: The proper pronunciation of "Y" in this case is in fact "Th"!

But I agree that there should be less of a profusion of these elements. As mentioned, I'd be happy to sacrifice the Ø in my name even, for a more streamlined and universal Ō. And I think the Dutch are best served by simply writing IJ instead of having a special ligature glyph for it – the special glyph may of course still be used stylistically! But I'm not sure whether we should merge æ and ä into ā...? Probably, if we do ö and ü at the same time, but I really like the æ! But hey, not gonna happen anyway so yeah.

Not sure whether Vietnamese really needs so many accents or whether they could cut down a bit to reduce the need for multiple accents on each letter? They do already use the circumflex which is intended as a multipurpose accent, as well as the tilde, so I'm not sure what they could do beyond this.

At any rate, with my Colemak[eD] mappings I find it easy enough to write all sorts of accents and ligatures.

In sum, accents and special letters are useful but there are probably too many of them as it is.

The Thorn letter (which ought to look like þ and not like Y!) should replace 'th' bigrams, certainly not Q! I wish we had it and ð back in Norwegian too; they vanished in the 12th century and since then we can't hear the difference between a 'tak' (a take, a grip) and a 'þak' (a roof).

I believe the Q is useful enough, all languages considered. In English though, if it were possible to make things more efficient one could generally spell 'Qu' → 'Q' because this is nearly always the case (as in Scrabble!). But people would have qalms about it and the resulting unrest would be hard to qell. ;-)

Scandinavians and Germans wouldn't be too happy if we had to write AE/OE/UE/AO consistently for ÆÄ/ØÖ/Ü/Å, nor would the Spanish & Friends like to revert to NN for Ñ. Same with the French and Ç vs CZ, etc. In these cases, the letters in question are relatively frequent in their languages and writing two letters for one would be undesirable.

I believe keyboards could fit in a couple more keys without breaking. The ISO board has one, the Brazilian board two and the Japanese/Korean boards a whole little collection. Then we'd have room for a couple more interesting letters and gamers would be happy too I guess. And people who didn't need so many keys could map them to Extend keys instead! ;-)

I didn't mean very good positions, but I'm a fan of having some extra keys for symbols and/or special letters. In other words, pretty much as it is but I'd like a couple keys more. The right Shift bar is way too fat for instance, and the Back key should've been split too. Likely Caps as well. This'd give us more to play with for special needs. Certainly not for frequently used letters! And indeed, the arrow key island etc can be dispensed with using Extend.

I think that removing Q and X etc would break too much. Sounds nice until you consider all the repercussions for the sum of all languages...!

Hehe, it's more or less the name that is used in English speaking countries for the ¨ letters I guess that's why.

I do speak German, how good I speak it though is another story. I work in a company where I do communicate completely in German, and I'm living in Kärnten, but my grammar still sucks :p Ich sollte eigentlch mehr deutsche Bücher lesen, aber ich bin leider zu faul :p

Yeah, I think they use that in Dutch quite a lot, since ee would be a long e sound, they use the diaersis to "cut the vowels apart" in words such as creëer whick looks kind of funny :p At least it's not as effed as in russian where e (ye) and ë (yo) are two letter, but people don't feel like writing the dots over the second, so they only use the first, since it's predictible from word stress which is which, the problem however is that wordstress isn't very predictible unless you're russian :p