The Braille Alphabet

History Of Braille

Braille Scripts

Braille is a universal system, whereby blind and partially sighted people around the world are able to read and write. Braille can be translated into many languages, as well as for other specialized subjects. Braille for other scripts include: Hebrew Braille; Japanese Braille; Korean Braille; Vietnamese Braille, and Tibetan Braille.

There are many extensions of Braille for additional letters with diacritics, such as ç, ô, é… When Braille is adapted to languages which do not use the Latin alphabet, the blocks are generally assigned to the new alphabet, according to how it is transliterated into the Latin alphabet, and the alphabetic order of the national script, and therefore, the natural order of Latin Braille, is disregarded. This is the case with Russian, Greek, Hebrew, Arabic, and Chinese.

For example: in Greek, gamma is written as Latin “g”, despite the fact that it has the alphabetic position of “c”; Hebrew “bet”, the second letter of the alphabet and cognate with the Latin letter “b”, is instead written “v”, as it is commonly pronounced; Russian “ts” is written as “c”, which is the usual letter for “ts” in those Slavic languages which use the Latin alphabet; and Arabic “f”, is written as “f”, despite being historically “p”, and occurring in that part of the Arabic alphabet, between historic “o” and “q”.

Esperanto letters with circumflexes, “c”, “g”, “h”, “j”, and “s”, are written as those letters without circumflexes, with a filled sixth dot. Therefore the letter “j” has the same representation as the English “w”, and to write a “w” in Esperanto, the dot 3 is filled, (dots 2-3-4-5-6 are used for “w”, instead of dots 2-4-5-6). The “u” used in Esperanto, also, is as the “u”, but the first dot is moved to the fourth place.

Greater differences occur in Chinese Braille. In the case of Mandarin Braille, which is based on Zhuyin rather than the Latin Pinyin alphabet, the traditional Latin Braille values are used for initial consonants, and the simple vowels. However, there are additional blocks for the tones, diphthongs, and vowel + consonant combinations. Cantonese Braille is also based on Latin Braille for many of the initial consonants and simple vowels, based on romanizations of a century ago, but the blocks adopt a double duty, with different values depending on whether they're placed in syllable-initial, or syllable-final position. For instance, the block for Latin “k”, represents old-style Cantonese “k”, (“g” in Yale and other modern romanizations), when initial, but “aak” when final; while Latin “j” represents Cantonese initial “j”, but final “oei”.

However, at least three adaptations of Braille have completely reassigned the Latin sound values of the blocks. These are, Japanese Braille, Korean Braille, and Tibetan Braille. In Japanese Braille, alphabetic signs for a consonant and vowel are combined, into a single syllabic block; in Korean Braille, the consonants have different syllable-initial, and syllable-final forms. These modifications made Braille much more compatible with Japanese kana, and Korean hangul, but meant that the Latin sound values could not be maintained.