Marco Cimarosti wrote:

>
> > 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.
>
> A typo for "trailing vowel".

A thinko, rather.

> > 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.
>
> Right.
>
> > > So, curiously, braille kana is actually an abjad, not a syllabary.
> >
> > I'd say it's basically a syllabary.
>
> Ooops! Another typo: chenage "abjad" into "abugida".

It would be an abugida only if one of the vowels went unnotated, so that
there was one series of consonants with nothing in the top left.
--
Peter T. Daniels grammatim@...