German Braille is one of the older
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 ...
alphabets. The French-based order of the letter assignments was largely settled on with the 1878 convention that decided the standard for
international braille
The goal of braille uniformity is to unify the braille alphabets of the world as much as possible, so that literacy in one braille alphabet readily transfers to another. Unification was first achieved by a convention of the ''International Congre ...
. However, the assignments for German letters beyond the 26 of the
basic Latin alphabet are mostly unrelated to
French
French (french: français(e), link=no) may refer to:
* Something of, from, or related to France
** French language, which originated in France, and its various dialects and accents
** French people, a nation and ethnic group identified with Franc ...
values.
Letters
![Übersicht Blindenschrift](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/b/b8/%C3%9Cbersicht_Blindenschrift.jpg)
In numerical order by decade, the letters are:
The generic accent sign, , is used with foreign names such as ''Molière'' that have accented letters not found in German. There are numerous contractions and abbreviations.
Punctuation
Punctuation is as follows:
Only the first asterisk is marked with dot 6, so print *** is in braille .
is the ''Artikel'' sign, marking an article of a document.
For the brackets of phonetic transcription, German Braille uses a modified form, .
Additional punctuation and symbols, especially mathematical, are explained in the external reference below.
Numbers
Numbers are introduced with the sign . They are dropped to decade 5 for ordinals and for the denominator of fractions.
So, for example, is , while is (4th), and is ́.
The percent sign requires the number sign even after a number: ; otherwise it would look like the (undefined) fraction .
In a compound fraction, a repeat of the number sign separate the units from the fraction: .
Formatting
The emphasis sign (for italics, underline, or bold) is marked with an extra point, , when it occurs in the middle of a word. It is doubled, , when more than one word is emphasized, in which case the ending sign will be required at the end of the last word.
The all-caps sign is used for initialisms and the like. Doubled, it is used for all-cap text, such as titles, and the same ending sign, , is used. Names with initials, such as ''J.S. Bach'', do not require the cap sign. The lower-case sign is used to mark mixed case or exceptions to expected capitalization; as such, it replaces the apostrophe that sets off the plural -s in print:
: , , .
(Note the initialism sign can be used for a single letter.)
Lower-case metric units are marked as lower-case: . This is useful, as it ends the scope of the number sign :
: , .
See also
![Moon-prayer](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/0/05/Moon-prayer.jpg)
*
Moon type
The Moon System of Embossed Reading (commonly known as the Moon writing, Moon alphabet, Moon script, Moon type, or Moon code) is a writing system for the blind, using embossed symbols mostly derived from the Latin script (but simplified). It is ...
is a simplification of the Latin alphabet for embossing. An adaptation for German-reading blind people has been proposed.
Notes
References
Sources
''Das System der deutschen Blindenschrift'' 2005
{{Braille
French-ordered braille alphabets
German language