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 blind, deafblind or who have low vision. It can be read either on embossed paper or by using refreshable braille disp ...
alphabet for writing
Dzongkha, 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 mountainou ...
. 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 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. The question and exclamation marks, for example, are prefixed by a point 6, and .
References
{{Braille
French-ordered braille alphabets
Tibetan language