The
Esperanto
Esperanto ( or ) is the world's most widely spoken constructed international auxiliary language. Created by the Warsaw-based ophthalmologist L. L. Zamenhof in 1887, it was intended to be a universal second language for international communic ...
language has a dedicated
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 displ ...
alphabet. One Esperanto braille magazine, ''Esperanta Ligilo'', has been published since 1904, and another, ''Aŭroro'', since 1920.
Alphabet
The
basic 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 ...
alphabet is extended for the print letters with diacritics. The
circumflex
The circumflex () is a diacritic in the Latin and Greek scripts that is also used in the written forms of many languages and in various romanization and transcription schemes. It received its English name from la, circumflexus "bent around" ...
is marked by adding dot 6 (lower right) to the base letter: ''ĉ'', ''ĝ'', ''ĥ'', ''ĵ'', ''ŝ''. Therefore, the letter ''ĵ'' has the same form as the unused French/English Braille letter ''w''; to write a ''w'' in a foreign name, dot 3 is added: ''w'' (see next section). Esperanto ''ŭ'' is made by reflecting ''u'', so that dot 1 becomes dot 4: ''ŭ''.
The alphabet is thus as follows.
Contracted braille is in limited use.
[''Esperanta stenografio,'' Nizhny Novgorod, 2003]
Transcribing foreign letters
Beside the basic-Latin foreign letters ''q'', ''w'', ''x'', ''y'', there are dedicated letters for the umlauted vowels that occur in print German, ''ä'', ''ö'', ''ü'':
Additional accented letters in other languages are handled by separate braille cells for the diacritics. These do not have a one-to-one correspondence with print:
These conventions are used for foreign names adapted to Esperanto Braille. Unassimilated text in another braille alphabet is indicated by the code .
Punctuation
;Single punctuation
The apostrophe and abbreviation point are both transcribed , which is distinct from the period/stop, .
;Paired punctuation
Quotation marks in print Esperanto are highly variable, and tend to follow the conventions of the country a text is published in. This is irrelevant for printing in braille.
Numbers
The apostrophe/abbreviation point is used to group digits within numbers, like the comma in English. In both print and braille Esperanto, the comma is used as the decimal mark, so:
: print English 100,000.00
:= print Esperanto 100 000,00
:= braille .
Formatting
Capitals are only marked for proper names. They are not used at the beginning of a sentence.
For emphasis (bold or italics in print), a simple is used to mark each of one to three words. For longer emphatic text, there are two formats: Either a colon precedes the simple emphatic sign, , and an additional sign is placed before the last emphasized word, or the sign is placed before and after the emphasized text.
In contracted (grade 2) braille, a different sign is used for capital letters, (dot 6). As in most braille orthographies, proper names are not contracted, and words preceded by this sign are not contracted in Esperanto Braille.
References
External links
Ligo internacia de blindaj esperantistoj
{{Braille
French-ordered braille alphabets
Esperanto