Typing Georgian and Armenian: two alphabets you can nearly guess

Two alphabets from nowhere else

Georgian and Armenian are neighbours, and neither script is related to the other or to anything else. Armenian was created around 405 AD by Mesrop Mashtots and has 39 letters in its modern form. Mkhedruli, the modern Georgian script, has 33 and has been in continuous use for around 1,600 years.

That independence is the reason both are more approachable than they look. A script invented deliberately, for one language, tends to have a clean relationship between letters and sounds — and a clean relationship between letters and sounds is exactly what makes a phonetic keyboard layout possible.

Georgian has one property that is rarer than any of this: no capital letters at all. There is no case distinction in Mkhedruli, so no shift key for letters, no capitalising a name or the start of a sentence, and none of the case-conversion problems that occupy so much software elsewhere. Two earlier Georgian alphabets survive in ecclesiastical use, and all three are on the UNESCO intangible cultural heritage list.

How far a keyboard can be guessed

Some non-Latin layouts put each letter on the Latin key its transliteration suggests. Others arrange letters by frequency and ignore the keycaps entirely. This is the single most useful thing to know before learning one, and it is measurable: take the keys where a reader of the Latin alphabet has a clear expectation, and count how many of them the layout meets.

Georgian meets all of them. A gives ა, B gives ბ, D gives დ, and it keeps going: every key a transliteration would predict carries that letter, which makes it the most guessable non-Latin keyboard on this site. If you know the Georgian alphabet you can type it almost immediately.

Armenian is mostly there and not completely. Around a third of the predictable keys go somewhere else — Q gives խ rather than the ք a transliteration would suggest — mostly because Armenian has more letters than the Latin alphabet has keys to lend, and several of its sounds have no single Latin letter. Those are the positions to learn deliberately; the rest follow the pattern.

The table puts both against the other layouts here that make the same attempt, and against the one that famously does not.

Two Armenians, one alphabet

Armenian is split between two standard forms. Eastern Armenian is used in Armenia and Iran; Western Armenian is used across most of the diaspora. They differ in pronunciation and in grammar, and Western Armenian kept the classical orthography while Eastern adopted a reformed spelling during the Soviet period.

For a typist the good news is that the letters are the same. It is the spellings that differ, so one keyboard serves both and the choice you are making is about which variety you are writing rather than which keys you are pressing.

Armenian punctuation is its own system and worth knowing about, because it is the part that looks like a mistake when you first meet it. A question is marked with a symbol placed over the stressed vowel of the questioned word rather than with a sign at the end of the sentence, and the full stop is a colon-like mark.

What each keyboard leaves off the chart

Neither alphabet fits a keyboard as comfortably as Hebrew or Russian does, and the keyboard guide on each language's lessons page shows it.

Georgian is close: nearly all the characters its practice words need are produced by a single unshifted key. Armenian has 39 letters against the 26 or so an unshifted level offers, so more of its inventory is on the shifted level, and the chart reaches correspondingly less.

This is worth saying rather than hiding, because it changes what a chart is for. For Georgian it is very nearly the whole keyboard; for Armenian it is the part you will use most and not all of it.

Everything physical transfers either way. These are alphabets typed one key per letter, with no input method, no dead keys for the ordinary letters, and left-to-right text — which puts them among the gentler second scripts to take on.