Braille - Other Braille Adaptations

Other Braille Adaptations

Other systems for assigning value to braille patterns are also followed, including the simple mapping of the alphabetical order onto the original French order. Some systems of braille start with unified braille, and then diverge significantly based on the phonology and structure of the target languages, while still other braille systems are completely novel, adopting positional forms, or even syllabic braille cells composed of separate vowel and consonant patterns.

In the various Chinese systems, traditional braille values are used for initial consonants and the simple vowels. In both Mandarin and Cantonese Braille, however, characters have different readings depending on whether they are placed in syllable-initial (onset) or syllable-final (rime) position. For instance, the cell for Latin k, ⠅, represents Cantonese k (g in Yale and other modern romanizations) when initial, but aak when final, while Latin j, ⠚, represents Cantonese initial j but final oei.

Novel systems of braille mapping include Korean, which adopts separate syllable-initial and syllable-final forms for its consonants, explicitly grouping braille cells into syllabic groups in the same way as hangul. Japanese, meanwhile, combines independent vowel dot patterns and modifier consonant dot patterns into a single braille cell – an abugida representation of each Japanese mora.