Japanese braille
| Japanese Braille ⠇⠮⠴⠟⠴⠐⠳ |
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|---|---|
| Type | |
| Languages | Japanese |
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Parent systems
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Night writing
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Print basis
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Kana |
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Child systems
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Two-Cell Chinese Braille (in conception) kantenji |
Japanese Braille is the braille script of the Japanese language. It is based on the original braille script, though the connection is tenuous. In Japanese it is known as tenji (点字?), literally "dot characters". It transcribes Japanese more or less as it would be written in the hiragana or katakana syllabaries, without any provision for writing kanji (Chinese characters).
Japanese Braille is a vowel-based abugida. That is, the glyphs are syllabic, but unlike kana they contain separate symbols for consonant and vowel, and the vowel takes 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. However, the semivowel y is indicated by point 4, one of the vowel points, and the vowel combination is dropped to the bottom of the block. When this point is written in isolation, it indicates that the following syllable has a medial y, as in mya. Syllables beginning with w are indicated by dropping the vowel points to the bottom of the cell without additional consonant points.
The chart below shows each braille character under the corresponding hiragana and its romanization. In order to illustrate the derivation of each character from its component vowel and consonant, the vowel points are written in black, and the consonant points in green. There is no such distinction in braille as it is actually used.
The vowels are assigned the braille patterns that occupy the upper-left half of the cell (dots 1-2-4) in numerical order: ⠁⠃⠉⠋⠊. (These are the first five letters of Braille's alphabet, ⠁⠃⠉⠙⠑, rotated to fit the available space.) The consonantal diacritics, on the other hand, have no apparent connection to international values or numerical order, corresponding as they do to international punctuation and formatting marks.
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Wikipedia