Kantenji
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Kantenji 漢点字 ⢱⢚ ⠷⣸ ⠓⢜ |
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|---|---|
| Type |
logographic
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| Languages | Japanese |
| Status | unofficial |
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Parent systems
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Night writing
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Print basis
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kanji |
Kantenji, or braille kanji, is a system of braille for writing the Japanese language. It was devised in 1969 by Taiichi Kawakami (川上 泰一?), a teacher at the , and was still being revised in 1991. It supplements Japanese braille by providing a means of directly encoding kanji characters without having to first convert them to kana. It uses an 8-dot braille cell, with the lower six dots corresponding to the cells of standard Japanese Braille, and the upper two dots indicating the constituent parts of the kanji. The upper dots are numbered 0 (upper left) and 7 (upper right), the opposite convention of 8-dot braille in Western countries, where the extra dots are added to the bottom of the cell. A kanji will be transcribed by anywhere from one to three braille cells.
Only kanji utilize the upper dots 0 and 7. A cell occupying only dots 1–6 is to be read as kana, or less commonly as the middle element of a three-cell kanji.
Kana readings are used to derive common kanji elements that share that reading. For example, the kana ⢆ き ki is used for elements based on the kanji 木, which has ki as one of its basic pronunciations. The two upper dots are then used to indicate whether this is a whole character, 木, or an element of a compound character. For a whole character, both upper dots are added, for ⢏ 木 ki. For a partial character, one upper dot is used: The left upper dot alone indicates the first (left, top, or outside) constituent part of a kanji, as in ⢇⢮ 村, and the right upper dot alone signals the final (right, bottom, or inside) constituent part of a kanji, as in ⢇⢎ 林. For those kanji where an element is repeated more than once, a suffix corresponding derived from the braille digit plus a right upper dot indicates the number of times an element occurs, as in ⢇⠚ = 森.
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