What "EnRuZh" stands for?
EnRuZH is an abbriviation for well-known keyboard layouts serving English, Russian and Chinese (sure, stretching the truth a bit), that everyone sees on monitors. There exist very many combinations of language pairs a user can input all over the world; the languages said here are from the list of the most-widely used in different parts of the world, as the reader probably knows. Yes, it's a well-known fact, but not everybody knows what stands behind this.
At present the software manufacturers are dealing with almost all used languages, but there is still no operating system either open source nor commercial ones, which could provide each and everyone language support in full, as a user requires.
Besides, for any local version of a language, that is as it is represented with the national code pages as well as within Unicode there is a good deal of keyboard layouts to input or output the textual data, which makes the bigger part of the user's manipulations in front of the PC. No need to say that for the languages having the alphabet, like for instance English or Russian, there's no serious problem to work out a keyboard layout; but for the language alphabet consisting of more than 26 letters, or those having no alphabet at all, like for example Chinese with its different variations for Mainland China, Hong Kong, Singapore and, of course, Taiwan, the text input through a keyboard is getting the shape of a real problem.
Any keyboard layout or input method inventor is free to solve the problem in his own way. The only limitation he or she has to keep in mind are an operating system's and those periferals aiding the input. But, after all, it is not final, too; as the user can use or not use depending on what he or she is able and needs: the trivial case is when a user's a native speaker and the system user at the same time and another case when the user's native language is different, which he's typing in at the moment and, what makes more fun, he doesn't know. Actually, the method described at the site may be of a good help for the users who cannot type in the Chinese and, perhaps, doesn't know this language as well.
The site has only two sections as of now: CangJie online dictionary (sorry, but proofreading's in progress) and CangJie Manual. The dictionary is a sort of facility to look up a character code either by typing a code or just coping the Chinese character itself. The manual is a kind of a good book giving a firm basement for those, wishing to master the CangJie input method. Getting through the manual and practicing the exercises may be a first step to typing in Chinese as freely as one may do in his mother's language.
What is CangJie?
The legend says that about 5000 years ago the grand grandfather of the Han Can-Jie (倉頡) using turtle bones worked out the set of pictographs became the base of the Chinese hyerogliphic (written) language and which is what so numerous Chinese are using outside PRC. That’s why the creator of this input method – Mr. Zhu Ban Fu (朱邦復) – has chosen this name to call the method late last century.
In Asia, and in the South-Eastern Asia especially, they have very considerable attitude to symbols and those written as well; it is different and has nothing in common with the academic scholasticism one can see in the Western science. Even in the way the basic hieroglyphs-radicals, that make the keyboard layout, are layered with one, who is pretty familiar with one of the Eastern philosophic trends, might see some traits of the old Far East cosmogony, where the triple relationships of the Heaven and the Earth are mediated in between with the Human; more details on it the reader can find later on.
