@mwichary @darkphoenix It's strange you call one commenter a "know-it-all" while acknowledging others bringing up the same issue (maybe Fedi is playing me?). I think the topic of "effortless markup" you brought up is really interesting and becomes even more interesting if we take into account other layouts. My quick idea: does every layout have "." without modifier?
(slightly related: I recently learned that C syntax differs so wildly from Pascal, because the former was designed by US keyboard users while the latter was from EU)