Sometimes even the letters are garbled. The first three are named after the first six letter keys, and roughly represent the English, German and French speaking countries. 4.1 Keyboard hardware reset Things may be wrong on a lower level than Linux knows about. Keyboards can often be programmed to use one out of three different sets of scancodes. However, I do not know of cases where this turned out to be a problem.
Some keyboards have a remapping capability built in.