Japanese braille

Japanese braille is a braille code for writing the Japanese language. It is based on the original braille system. In Japanese it is known as nihongo|"tenji"|点字|, literally "dot characters". Below is a basic chart of Japanese braille with the Japanese hiragana character followed by the standard roman character reading above each braille character.

Japanese braille is a vowel-based abugida. That is, the glyphs are syllabic, but unlike kana contain separate symbols for consonants and vowels, and the vowels take primacy. The vowels are written in the upper left corner (points 1, 2, 4) and may be used alone. The consonants are written in the lower right corner (points 3, 5, 6) and cannot occur alone. (An isolated "t" would be read as "wo", for example. The only exception is "m", which when written alone is the syllabic nasal, which may perhaps be a design feature rather than coincidence.) However, the semivowel "y" is indicated by point 4, a vowel point, and the vowel symbol is dropped to the bottom of the block. When this is written in isolation, it indicates that the following syllable has a medial "y," as in "mya." For syllables beginning with "w" the vowel is also dropped, but no consonant is written. (Except for the syllable "wa," historic "w" is silent in modern Japanese.)

Main chart

The placement of these blocks mirrors the equivalent kana: the "sokuon" indicates that the following consonant is geminant, whereas the "chōon" indicates that the preceding vowel is long.

Punctuation

Besides the punctuation of Japanese, braille also has symbols to indicate that the following signs are Hindu numerals or in the Latin alphabet.

There are several additional punctuation marks, including one to indicate that the following signs are in English and not just in the Latin alphabet.

See also

* Korean braille
* Chinese braille
* Vietnamese braille
* Hebrew braille

External links

* [http://www.hi.sfc.keio.ac.jp/access/arc/NetBraille/etc/brttrl.html Japanese braille Tutorial]
* [http://homepages.cwi.nl/~dik/english/codes/braille.html braille for various scripts]