Can't reply to iSchorr -> SwissGerman in OS X

[fryke]

iSchorr wrote me a message on this board. He wrote:

Schweizerdeutsch in OS X

Fryke,

I know this is pretty random, but I just noticed that you live in Winterhur, and had noticed that Jaguar gives me a "Schweizer Deutsch" language option in the language panel (Previous versions may have as well, I just never noticed).

I was just curious - is there really much, or any difference between this and the standard "Deutsch" option? Is it just that the keyboard layout is slightly different?

I played around with the setting, and didn't notice any fields that were different, or particularly Swiss. I was surprised to see it, since I know that Swiss German is primarily a spoken dialect, and not typically written out.

Actually, it was your post mentioning Adobe's slow internationalization that prompted me to ask.
I saw your location and figured you probably know the answer to my question.

Thanks,
Ian

I'm hope you're reading this, Ian. And turn your messages feature on, this is awful!

Okay, the answer...

Swiss German is a spoken language only, but because there's also a French and an Italian part of Switzerland, we use accent-characters (é, è, à, ç etc.) more often than the Germans, it seems. Therefore, our keyboards look different from the German keyboards and we need a different keyboard-layout-table.