Don Osborn wrote:

> The annual International Mother Language Day celebration this year
> has as a theme braille and sign languages used by blind and deaf
> people. I am aware that there are diverse traditional/indigenous
> sign language systems around the world (e.g., Hausa, Inuit), but
> are there different forms of braille writing or "symbols" used
> traditionally among diverse cultures for communication with/among
> the blind?

Every language has its specific braille orthography.

The six-dot rectangle and the reading direction (left to right) are
always the same in every national braille, so that exactly the same
embossing machinery can be used all over the word. However, the
interpretation of each six-dot combination varies depending on the
language and the writing system.

Most braille systems assign approximately the same values as in the
original French braille to the basic 25 letter combinations (the
usual latin letters excluding "W"). But the encoding of all other
letters and symbols varies widely from one language to another. E.g.,
IIRC, "é" corrisponds to different dot-combination in Italian, French
and Spanish.

The only braille system I know of that completely violates the
original French convention is Japanese. Japanese braille only has
kana (making no distinction between Katakana and Hiragana). Kana
letters are encoded using three dots for the leading consonant and
three dot for the trailing consonant. So, curiously, braille kana is
actually an abjad, not a syllabary.

One of the most curious and complex brailles is probably the so-
called "Grade 2 English", with its complex system of abbreviations
for words and parts of words. In practice, English braille can be
seen as a highly logographic system: it does have phonetic letters,
but it also has a relatively big set of "logograms".

OTOH, the Chinese braille is completely phonetic. The system is quite
similar to bopomofo: it has letters for initial consonants,
for "finals" (i.e. the vowel plus the possible final consonants) and
for tones. So, each Chinese syllable (corresponding to a logogram in
the sighted script) is always written with exactly three braille
letters. Because of this fixed length, no spacing is needed between
syllables.

Before adopting this phonetic system, some Chinese institutes for the
blind used a (crazy, IMHO) numeric encoding to represent logographic
character, similar to the code used up to a few years ago to send
telegrams in Chinese.

In Arabic and Hebrew, the notation of short vowels is optional and
used only in grammatical, religious or poetic texts, exactly as in
the corresponding scripts for sighted people. Notice that Hebrew and
Arabic brailles are written L-to-R too.

Beside six-dot braille, there also is an eight-dot braille: the 64
combinations having the lowemost two dots blank retain their
usual "literary" value, while the remaining 192 combinations are
assigned to symbols necessary to the discipline being dealt with
(mathematic symbols, musical notes, phonetic symbols, etc.).

I know there is a nice book about word-wide braille, but I have seen
only small excerpts from it: C. Mackenzie, "World Braille Usage",
jointly published by Unesco and US Library of Congress, 1990.

--
Marco