Re: IMLD, 2/21/05: Braille & sign languages

On Tue, 22 Feb 2005 16:14:48 -0000, Marco Cimarosti
<marco.cimarosti@...> wrote:

>
> 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.

Eh? Japanese syllables don't have trailing consonants, except for -n.

From the descriptions I've seen, in general, the three dots at the top
left represent the vowel, while the three at the bottom right
represent the consonant, so one braille cell can represent a CV
syllable of the kind that's typical for Japanese. Variations (such as
CyV and CVC:V, as well as voiced stops) are handled by additional
cells.

> So, curiously, braille kana is actually an abjad, not a syllabary.

I'd say it's basically 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".

German "Kurzschrift" is also fairly complex, and it seemed to me that
it abbreviates even more than English does (probably necessary since
German text is, in general, longer than the same information expressed
in English).

For example, they make much more use of two-cell abbreviations for
words and part-words, I felt, compared to the Grade 2 English use of
"short-form words", and overload cells with more meanings depending on
where in the word they occur and/or which special cells they are
preceded by. (One clever thing, I thought, was the dot-5 which is an
"umlaut dot", indicating e.g. that the following "lg" represents not
"lang" but "läng", and the like).

> 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.

I've read that tones are often left out in writing Chinese braille,
though, if the result is reasonably unambiguous from context.

> 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.

Sounds a little bit like capitalisation in German :) Generally, German
braille is written entirely in lower-case (unlike, say, American
braille, though I believe British braille usage also uses optional
capitalisation), but capitalisation can be indicated when necessary,
e.g. when teaching print spelling or for acronyms and other
abbreviations.

Cheers,
--
Philip Newton <philip.newton@...>