1829 braille
| Braille (first edition) |
|
|---|---|
| Type |
alphabet
|
| Languages | French |
|
Time period
|
1824 to ca. 1837 |
|
Parent systems
|
night writing
|
|
Child systems
|
modern French Braille |
| (not supported) | |
Louis Braille's original publication, Procedure for Writing Words, Music, and Plainsong in Dots (1829), credits Barbier's night writing as being the basis for the braille script. It differed in a fundamental way from modern braille: It contained nine decades (series) of characters rather than the modern five, utilizing dashes as well as dots. Braille recognized, however, that the dashes were problematic, being difficult to distinguish from the dots in practice, and those characters were abandoned in the second edition of the book.
The first four decades indicated the 40 letters of the alphabet (39 letters of the French alphabet, plus English w); the fifth the digits; the sixth punctuation; the seventh and part of the eighth mathematical symbols. The seventh decade was also used for musical notes. Most of the remaining characters were unassigned.
As in modern braille, most of the higher decades were derived from the first:
Thus the 1st and 5th decades occupied only the top half of the cell, while all characters in the other decades had a dot or dash in the bottom row.
The supplemental signs were ⠄⠤⠜⠼ and a top dash with ⠠⠰. Of the 125 (5³) possible patterns, 97 were used. The modern 5th decade and other supplemental signs do not appear in the 1829 version of braille, apart from ⠐ and ⠒ in plainsong notation.
Punctuation differed slightly from today, even accounting for the shift downward when the dash was dropped from the bottom row of the cell. ⠶ was used for both parentheses, as in modern English braille. ⠦ was used for either quotation mark; ⠴ was a pipe. ⠢ was the question mark, as in modern French braille, while ⠔ was the asterisk, which is used doubled in English braille.
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