Esperanto Braille
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Through Braille
Alphabet
The basic braille alphabet is extended for the print letters with diacritics. The circumflex is marked by adding dot 6 (lower right) to the base letter: ⠩ ĉ, ⠻ ĝ, ⠳ ĥ, ⠺ ĵ, ⠮ ŝ. Therefore, the letter ĵ has the same form as the unused French/English Braille letter ⠺ w; to write a w in a foreign name, dot 3 is added: ⠾ w (see next section). Esperanto ŭ is made by reflecting u, so that dot 1 becomes dot 4: ⠬ ŭ. The alphabet is thus as follows.
Contracted braille is in limited use.
Transcribing foreign letters
Beside the basic-Latin foreign letters q, w, x, y, there are dedicated letters for the umlauted vowels that occur in print German, ä, ö, ü:
Additional accented letters in other languages are handled by separate braille cells for the diacritics. These do not have a one-to-one correspondence with print:
These conventions are used for foreign names adapted to Esperanto Braille. Unassimilated text in another braille alphabet is indicated by the code ⠐⠂.
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Punctuation
- Single punctuation
The apostrophe and abbreviation point are both transcribed ⠄, which is distinct from the period/stop, ⠲. A series of colons, ⠒⠒⠒, is a common dinkus for dividing sections of texts.
- Paired punctuation
Quotation marks in print Esperanto are highly variable, and tend to follow the conventions of the country a text is published in. This is irrelevant for printing in braille.
Numbers
The apostrophe/abbreviation point ⠄ is used to group digits within numbers, like the comma in English. In both print and braille Esperanto, the comma is used as the decimal mark, so:
- print English 100,000.00
- = print Esperanto 100 000,00
- = braille ⠼⠁⠚⠚⠄⠚⠚⠚⠂⠚⠚.
Formatting
Capitals are only marked for proper names. They are not used at the beginning of a sentence.
For emphasis (bold or italics in print), a simple ⠸ is used to mark each of one to three words. For longer emphatic text, there are two formats: Either a colon precedes the simple emphatic sign, ⠒⠸, and an additional sign ⠸ is placed before the last emphasized word, or the sign ⠠⠄ is placed before and after the emphasized text.
In contracted (grade 2) braille, a different sign is used for capital letters, ⠠ (dot 6). As in most braille orthographies, proper names are not contracted, and words preceded by this sign are not contracted in Esperanto Braille.