Dzongkha Braille or Bhutanese 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 for writing
Dzongkha
Dzongkha (; ) is a Sino-Tibetan language that is the official and national language of Bhutan. It is written using the Tibetan script.
The word means "the language of the fortress", from ' "fortress" and ' "language". , Dzongkha had 171,080 n ...
, the national language of
Bhutan
Bhutan (; dz, འབྲུག་ཡུལ་, Druk Yul ), officially the Kingdom of Bhutan,), is a landlocked country in South Asia. It is situated in the Eastern Himalayas, between China in the north and India in the south. A mountainous ...
. It is based on English braille, with some extensions from international usage. As in print, the vowel ''a'' is not written.
Despite Dzongkha and
Tibetan
Tibetan may mean:
* of, from, or related to Tibet
* Tibetan people, an ethnic group
* Tibetan language:
** Classical Tibetan, the classical language used also as a contemporary written standard
** Standard Tibetan, the most widely used spoken dial ...
using nearly the
same alphabet in print, the braille alphabets differ radically, with
Tibetan Braille closer to German conventions and assigned letter values according to different sound correspondences.
Alphabet
[UNESCO (2013]
World Braille Usage
3rd edition.
The reversed letters used in Sanskrit loanwords are indicated with the diacritic :
:
ཊ ,
ཋ ,
ཌ ,
ཎ ,
ཥ .
The vowel "a" is inherent in a consonant letter, and is not written explicitly. Other vowels are written after a consonant as in English Braille. When a vowel occurs at the beginning of a word, the vowel letter is carried by a
null consonant ཨ :
Sanskrit vowel-marking includes:
:
ཨཿ ''aḥ'',
ཨྃ ''aṃ'',
as in
ཀིཿ ''kiḥ'',
ཀོྃ ''koṃ''.
It's not clear how
conjunct
{{For, the linguistic and logical operation of conjunction, Logical conjunction
In linguistics, the term conjunct has three distinct uses:
*A conjunct is an adverbial that adds information to the sentence that is not considered part of the propos ...
s are indicated. However, the conjunct
ཀྵ ''kṣa'' in Sanskrit loans suggests that the 45 points conjoin two consonants.
Punctuation
Digits are as in English Braille. Native punctuation (syllable divider, comma, stop) is:
Roman punctuation differs from that of
English Braille
English Braille, also known as ''Grade 2 Braille'', is the braille alphabet used for English. It consists of around 250 letters ( phonograms), numerals, punctuation, formatting marks, contractions, and abbreviations (logograms). Some English Bra ...
. The question and exclamation marks, for example, are prefixed by a point 6, and .
References
{{Braille
French-ordered braille alphabets
Tibetan language