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". Below is a basic chart of Japanese Braille with the Japanese hiragana character followed by the standard roman character reading above each braille character.
Japanese Braille is a vowel-based abugida. That is, the glyphs are syllabic, but unlike kana 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. For syllables beginning with w the vowel is also dropped, but no consonant is written.
Read more about Japanese Braille: Main Chart, Other Symbols, Punctuation
Famous quotes containing the words japanese and/or braille:
“I am a lantern—
My head a moon
Of Japanese paper, my gold beaten skin
Infinitely delicate and infinitely expensive.”
—Sylvia Plath (1932–1963)
“she will not say how there
must be more to living
than this brief bright bridge
of the raucous bed or even
the slow braille touch of him
like a heavy god grown light....”
—Anne Sexton (1928–1974)