English Braille is a form of written English, so it has embossment combos for everything you usually see: hyphens, quotation marks, etc. However, there are specific dot patterns to instruct "the following is a capital letter" and also "the following is a number", since they use A-J as 1,2....9, 0. Open and close parentheses are the same pattern, so you infer which one it is by whether there was another parentheses mark already. Open and close quotations are different, but open quotation = question mark, so which one it is is inferred via position relative to the sentence.Bara wrote:That I couldn't begin to claim to know, maybe Linnear B or someone else could answer better, but as far as I know braille is simply a code to translate the visual writting into tactile writting. I would imagine it would carry the majority of the conventions and alphabet of the language being written in. But then I used to think that a conversation in ASL was pretty much the same as spoken english. I've only seen one used by a girl in my high school choir years ago. Aside from asking what they gizmo did and her explanation of how the key comboinations produced different braille letters I left it at that. I never felt any compulsion to try to copy out "War and Peace" in braille or anything. Hell, I never even felt the desire to try to READ "War and Peace"; in general Russian writters make my head hurt.Onearmdude wrote:Does that mean that there are only 26 embossment combinations needed to represent all 26 letters, or are an additional 26 needed to represent the capital letter variations? And are there any kind of embossed analogues to indents and line breaks?Bara wrote: They make braile writters for the blind. You feed a sheet of paper in and as you hit key combinations it embosses the braille letters on the paper. Think of chords on a piano or guitar; one chord in the letter "a", another is the letter "b", all the way to the letter "z".
Plain braille transcription, where you go "punch in one braille pattern per letter", is Grade 1 Braille and is used only by beginners. Grade 2 Braille is used for virtually all books to reduce space and increase reading speed. There's a set of words like "but", "do", etc. which are abbreviated. There's contractions for double consonants like "ff", too. Grade 3 Braille is like shorthand and is used for writing quick notes and the like.
There used to be a lot of braille conventions for special texts like mathematics, but there's now a Unified English Braille Code that Anglophone countries are beginning to adopt.
Japanese braille, as you might expect, (sorta) codes for hiragana. The dot matrix for say, "ka", are the dot pattern for "k" and a dot pattern for "a" put together. The consonant patterns mostly use the 3 dots on the lower-right, the vowel patterns the three dots on the upper-left. There are also separate matrices used to mark that the following syllable begins with a voiced consonant, that the vowel is doubled, that numbers or romaji follow, punctuation marks, etc.
WIkipedia's articles give a good overview, of course.
