Touch by Touch, Dots with Dots——About Braille

Because they both serve special populations, Braille and sign language are often mentioned in the same breath. But from a linguistic perspective, Braille and sign language are not on the same level.

Braille is a writing that belongs to a certain "ordinary" language and records this language like the "ordinary" writing of that language. For example, there is no essential difference between Malay written in Latin letters, Arabic letters or Braille.

Sign language is an independent language - it may have some relationship with the local "ordinary" language (such as "space writing" is also a supplementary expression of sign language), but generally speaking, in There are not necessarily many similarities in grammar. For example, American Sign Language (American Sigh Language) is a topic-first language, which is similar to Chinese, but different from the most important "ordinary" language in the United States - English [1]. Steven Pinker described the topic priority nature of American Sign Language in "The Language Instinct" as follows: [2]

There are many kinds of texts in today's world. Apart from anything else, there is a huge difference between the two scripts we are most familiar with: Chinese characters and Latin letters. But all the Braille still in use in the world looks the same at first glance. They are all in the six-dot format as shown in the title picture - or more professionally, it is called Braille. It is named after its inventor, Frenchman Louis Braille.

Each point of Braille has two states: if conditions permit, these two states should be "convex" and "no state" - obviously, such Braille is useful to blind people. Practical meaning; however, due to limited conditions here, only "small solid circles" and "small hollow circles" can be used instead. When purely using language to describe the glyph of a Braille character, use numbers 1 to 6 to describe each point in order from top to bottom and from left to right; if the point is a "convex" or a "small solid circle", Then say its corresponding number, otherwise skip this number. For example, in the first two Braille characters of the Malay word "Malay" written in Braille above, the first is described as (6), and the second is described as (12).

Although the basics of these Braille characters for different languages ??are the same, the working methods are not very similar.

For languages ??that originally use Latin letters, such as English, French, Spanish, etc., the braille writing methods for the 26 basic Latin letters are almost the same, but the letters or letter combinations corresponding to other braille letters There are big differences in these languages; for example (12456) in French Braille represents the letter ?, in Spanish Braille it represents the letter ?, and in English it represents the letter combination er.

The Malay language of Malaysia is also "a language that originally used the Latin alphabet." The Malay word "Malay" written above is written in Braille, except for the first Braille character of each word. Except for the capital letter indicating that the first letter of the word is capitalized, and the blind word in the middle that is all "small hollow circles" indicating a space, the remaining twelve blind words all correspond to the twelve Latin letters of Bahasa Melayu.

The characters of some languages ??are not originally Latin letters, or even full phonetic characters, but they use Braille in a similar way to English and French. Such as Chinese and Tibetan.

Some languages ??use Braille in a manner similar to the language's "normal" writing. Such as Arabic and Japanese.

Arabic letters are consonant phonemes, and short vowels do not appear under normal circumstances; if you want to write short vowels, you need to write some specific symbols (or these symbols) above or below other letters are short vowels). Although Arabic Braille [3] has braille characters corresponding to each short vowel, they are not written under normal circumstances. However, it should be noted that although the Arabic letters are read from right to left, the reading order of Arabic Braille is from left to right, which is the same as other Braille in the world. The picture below shows the four ways of writing the word "Egypt" (Arabic Latin transliteration is Mi?r). The upper left is the normal Arabic writing (that is, only the three letters M?r are written), the lower left is the writing with short vowels (that is, all four letters are written), the upper right is the Braille writing corresponding to the upper left, and the lower right It is the Braille writing method corresponding to the lower left.

Kana is a syllabic script, and Japanese Braille is also a syllabic script. In braille for most languages, a single braille character generally represents only a single consonant or vowel letter, while a single braille character in Japanese corresponds to a single kana. However, the glyph rules of Japanese Braille and Kana are different. For example, hiragana か (ka), き (ki) and さ (sa), although the latter two have the same vowels or consonants as か, their glyphs are completely different - they do not have the same consonants or vowels. The glyphs are similar; Japanese Braille characters have rules that are easier to remember. Please see the picture below:

It can be found that the consonants of か and き are the same, so the states of their (356) three dots are the same , the vowels of か and さ are the same, so the states of their (124) three points are the same.

Since the Japanese phonetic system is relatively simple, the number of vowels and consonants is relatively small, and legal syllables are always a single vowel or a single consonant [4] or a consonant plus a vowel, so you can use points that do not repeat each other. They represent the vowels and consonants of a syllable respectively, and are condensed into a blind word. That is, the blind character (16) for か can be seen as consisting of two blind characters (1) representing the vowel a and (6) representing the consonant k.

Braille in some other languages ??actually has a single braille character representing a syllable, such as Korean Braille (1246) representing the syllable ? (ga), English Braille (1246) representing the letter combination ed, but like Japanese Pure syllabic writing like Braille is still rare.

After briefly talking about Braille in some foreign languages, let’s talk about Chinese Braille. When you are bored, you can read the Braille on the elevator buttons

As mentioned before, Chinese uses Braille in a similar way to English and French - in fact, two Chinese Braille, current Braille (hey, people call it this name, it doesn’t mean that the other type is not current; although current Braille is indeed used more) and Chinese double-spelling Braille, they are all purely phonetic. It is conceivable that if Chinese Braille is based on Chinese characters - it is really difficult to imagine.

Since current Braille is more commonly used, I will only detail current Braille.

Please allow me to directly use the diagram from Wikipedia to show the correspondence between current Braille and Chinese Pinyin letters.

As you can see, the current Braille and Pinyin letters do not have a strict one-to-one correspondence. For example, (1245) (g/j), when it is spelled with (35) (a), it means Pinyin g, and when it is spelled with (24) (yi/i), it means Pinyin j. Some finals in Pinyin, such as yi and i, are written in different ways when used alone or when combined with initial consonants, but they are written in only one way in current Braille.

Like Pinyin, current Braille also has tones, and each tone is a blind word that appears after each syllable - but in actual use, there are many cases where the tones are not marked. [5]

Since you want to recognize the Braille on the elevator buttons, you also need to know the Arabic numerals of the current Braille. The current braille requires a (3456) braille character at the beginning of the word to indicate "this word is an Arabic numeral". Ten Arabic numerals are shown in the picture. Regarding the representation of numbers—including the Braille letter (3456) that marks the number and the ten Arabic numerals—the current Braille is exactly the same as English Braille, French Braille, etc.

Compared with current Braille, Chinese double-spelling Braille will be more difficult to recognize if you are not proficient in it. The pronunciation method of Chinese Double Pinyin Braille is not quite consistent with Chinese Pinyin. The vast majority of individual Chinese characters only correspond to two braille characters in Chinese double-pin braille - and this also includes tones. This is because the intermediary (if it exists) in Chinese double-pin braille is condensed into one braille character with the initial consonant, and its tone is condensed into one braille character with the final consonant. The picture below compares how the three characters "文", "桡" and "false" (all with tones) are written in two types of Braille.

The first braille character of the current braille "文" corresponds to the Chinese pinyin wen/un, and the second braille character is the tone. The first braille character of the Chinese double-pinyin braille "文" corresponds to the Chinese pinyin w, and the second braille character corresponds to the Chinese pinyin én. The first braille character of the current braille "桡" corresponds to the Chinese pinyin l, the second braille character corresponds to the Chinese pinyin wen/un, and the third braille character is the tone. The first braille character of the Chinese double-spelling braille "桡" corresponds to the Chinese pinyin lu, and the second braille character corresponds to the Chinese pinyin ēn. The first braille character of the current braille "false" corresponds to the Chinese pinyin g/j, the second braille character corresponds to the Chinese pinyin ya/ia, and the third braille character is the tone. The first blind character of the Chinese double-pinyin braille "false" corresponds to the Chinese pinyin ji, and the second blind character corresponds to the Chinese pinyin ǎ.

Finally, let us apply what we have learned and recognize the braille on the elevator buttons!

If you really want to see the answer directly...please go to the Weibo I forwarded or @MTJJ木木’s Weibo to search. Well, it’s not the most recent Weibo.

[1] To put it simply, a topic-prominent language can legitimately bring the topic (not necessarily the subject) of a sentence to the beginning of the sentence by organizing its syntax. The opposite of topic-first languages ??are subject-prominent languages, such as English. We can roughly understand the difference between these two types of languages ??by comparing the two sets of sentences. Group 1: When referring to the weather, Chinese can directly say "It rains" - this is a complete sentence - the corresponding complete sentence in English is "It rains", which must have a formal subject. Group 2: When emphasizing the object in the sentence, Chinese can ignore the default word order and directly bring the component to the beginning of the sentence. For example, in the original sentence "I have finished my homework," to emphasize "homework", you can say "I wrote my homework." "It's done", compared with the original sentence, the word order has changed, but nothing has been added - the corresponding complete sentence in English is "It is the homework that I have done", which still requires a formal subject.

[2] There is also a description in "Language Instinct", which shows that the grammar of American Sign Language and English are obviously different (for example, the change of the English verb itself cannot indicate whether the object is singular or plural, but American Sign Language can ), because it is too long, so I posted it in the comments:

[3] As shown in the previous picture, Malay is also written with Arabic letters. In fact, the Malay language in Malaysia is written with Latin letters, and the Malay language in Brunei is written with Arabic letters. Malay Braille in Malaysia adopts the same form as English Braille, but it is not yet mature and belongs to grade-1 braille, which only uses braille corresponding to the 26 basic Latin letters; in contrast, English Braille belongs to Grade-2 braille uses a single braille word to correspond to common letter combinations (as mentioned above (12456) represents the letter combination er). The Malay Braille in Brunei has not yet been standardized. Therefore, in the previous "Malay" there are only braille characters corresponding to the Latin alphabet, but not to the Arabic alphabet.

[4] "A single consonant becomes a syllable" is ん. Strictly speaking, it should be called a beat. However, this article is not mainly about Japanese phonology, so I will not go into it.

[5] The current rules for tones in Braille are quite complex; to put it simply, tones should be used as little as possible without causing ambiguity.