nathillard

I’m surprised this hasn’t been linked to yet: Brian Wilson/The Beach boys’ supposed genius was the product of an intentional marketing campaign https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brian_Wilson_is_a_genius

I hadn't heard of this, but something similar has been attested with Thai:

"Two of the consonants, ฃ (kho khuat) and ฅ (kho khon), are no longer used in written Thai, but still appear on many keyboards and in character sets. When the first Thai typewriter was developed by Edwin Hunter McFarland in 1892, there was simply no space for all characters, thus two had to be left out." (source https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thai_script , pointing to https://web.archive.org/web/20101219214315/http://www.t-h-a-... )

I originally heard about this in this fantastic book, which I read earlier this year: https://www.amazon.com/Chinese-Typewriter-Thomas-S-Mullaney-... . Its focus is mostly the Chinese keyboard, and it does a great job detailing this, but there's a section about Edwin Mcfarland and his theories: https://www.google.com/books/edition/_/GuV1DwAAQBAJ?hl=en&gb...