Burmese Braille is the
braille
Braille (Pronounced: ) is a tactile writing system used by people who are visually impaired, including people who are Blindness, blind, Deafblindness, deafblind or who have low vision. It can be read either on Paper embossing, embossed paper ...
alphabet of languages of Burma written in the
Burmese script
Burmese may refer to:
* Something of, from, or related to Myanmar, a country in Southeast Asia
* Burmese people
* Burmese language
* Burmese alphabet
* Burmese cuisine
* Burmese culture
Animals
* Burmese cat
* Burmese chicken
* Burmese ( ...
, including
Burmese and
Karen
Karen may refer to:
* Karen (name), a given name and surname
* Karen (slang), a term and meme for a demanding woman displaying certain behaviors
People
* Karen people, an ethnic group in Myanmar and Thailand
** Karen languages or Karenic l ...
. Letters that may not seem at first glance to correspond to international norms are more recognizable when traditional romanization is considered. For example, ''s'' is rendered ''th'', which is how it was romanized when Burmese Braille was developed (and is how it often still is romanized); similarly ''c'' and ''j'' as ''s'' and ''z''.
History
The first braille alphabet for Burmese was developed by Father
William Henry Jackson
William Henry Jackson (April 4, 1843 – June 30, 1942) was an American photographer, Civil War veteran, painter, and an explorer famous for his images of the American West. He was a great-great nephew of Samuel Wilson, the progenitor of Am ...
ca. 1918. There was no provision for the voiced aspirate series of consonants (''gh, jh, dh, bh''), nor for the retroflex (''tt'' etc.), and Jackson provided distinct letters for complex onsets such as ''ky, hm'' and for various syllable rimes (''ok, ein, aung,'' etc.), with no regard to how they are written in the print Burmese alphabet. These aspects have all been changed, as have several of the letters for the values which were retained. However, some of the old letters, unusual by international standards, remain, such as for ''ng'' and for ''i''.
Charts
Print letters
The letters in print Burmese transcribe consonants and, in syllable-initial position, vowels. The consonants each have a corresponding letter in braille, but the initial (stand-alone) vowels in print are in braille all written plus the letter for the appropriate diacritic (see next section). The consonant ''ny'' has two forms in print which are distinct in braille as well.
[World Braille Usage](_blank)
, UNESCO, 2013
:
Stacked consonants
The stacking of consonants (conjuncts) in print is indicated with in braille. That is, Burmese Braille has two ''
virama
Virama ( ्) is a Sanskrit phonological concept to suppress the inherent vowel that otherwise occurs with every consonant letter, commonly used as a generic term for a codepoint in Unicode, representing either
# halanta, hasanta or explicit virā ...
s'', one corresponding to print ''virama'' (see next section), and one corresponding to stacking. For example, ''kambha'' "world" is written .
[The sources used for this article are not explicit on the order of the braille letters.]
Print diacritics
The diacritics in print, which transcribe both vowels and consonants, are rendered as follows in Karen Braille.
[Karen Braille chart]
at the LoC
is used to mark syllable- or word-initial vowels, which have distinct letters in the Burmese print alphabet. For example,
Numbers
Burmese numerals are represented as follows:
Punctuation
The following punctuation is specific to Burmese. (See
Burmese alphabet#Punctuation for an explanation.) Western punctuation presumably uses Western braille conventions.
References
{{burmese language
French-ordered braille alphabets
Burmese language