Comment 5 for bug 198655

Created an attachment (id=18790)
The Official Kyrgyz Phonetic and Standard Keyboard Layouts

In 2005 the Government of the Kyrgyz Republic adopted the official keyboard layouts for Kyrgyz language. Unfortunately, the text of the Governmental Regulation is available only in Kyrgyz and Russian languages (http://www.kyrgyz.us/files/jobo.pdf). However, I will try to explain the most important nuances in the document which require change of default keyboard layout in Ubuntu (and generally Linux systems) for the Kyrgyz Language.

The current keyboard layout for the Kyrgyz language for Linux systems has been written by Russian programmers on the basis of default layout for the Russian language. Currently, it is simply a copy-pasted Russian layout with characters specific to Kyrgyz language put to the third level access keys. Kyrgyz Cyrillic layout has some extra letters (Cyrillic_u_straight, Cyrillic_U_straight, Cyrillic_en_descender, Cyrillic_EN_descender, Cyrillic_o_bar, Cyrillic_O_bar) specific to Kyrgyz language, which are used more often in comparison with some characters specific to Russian language (Cyrillic_ya, Cyrillic_YA, Cyrillic_yu, Cyrillic_YU, Cyrillic_hardsign, Cyrillic_HARDSIGN, Cyrillic_shcha, Cyrillic_SHCHA, Cyrillic_tse, Cyrillic_TSE, Cyrillic_io, Cyrillic_IO, Cyrillic_softsign, Cyrillic_SOFTSIGN, Cyrillic_ie, Cyrillic_IE). In fact last letters specific to Russian language are non-existent in Kyrgyz language and are used only to write Russian words.

The main purpose of the Regulation was to eliminate uncomfortable use of Russian keyboard layout for Kyrgyz language and to come up with the first official Kyrgyz layout. The regulation was developed during years of 2004 and 2005 by the Agency of Science and Intellectual Property under the Government of the Kyrgyz Republic with participation of UNDP and Soros Foundation.

The proposed keyboard layout offers exactly the same Standard and Phonetic Kyrgyz Keyboard layouts which were presented by the Regulation. It positions three specific to Kyrgyz language characters to the first level of keyboard (direct access without pressing any auxiliary keys) and saves some specific to Russian language letters to less frequently used keys of the keyboard.