Bharati Braille

Bharati braille ( ), or Bharatiya Braille ( hi, भारती ब्रेल ' "Indian braille"), is a largely unified braille script for writing the languages of India. When India gained independence, eleven braille scripts were in use, in different parts of the country and for different languages. By 1951, a single national standard had been settled on, Bharati braille, which has since been adopted by Sri Lanka, Nepal, and Bangladesh. There are slight differences in the orthographies for Nepali in India and Nepal, and for Tamil in India and Sri Lanka. There are significant differences in Bengali Braille between India and Bangladesh, with several letters differing. Pakistan has not adopted Bharati braille, so the Urdu Braille of Pakistan is an entirely different alphabet than the Urdu Braille of India, with their commonalities largely due to their common inheritance from English or International Braille. Sinhala Braille. Letters are assigned as consistently as possible across the various regional scripts of India as they are transliterated in the Latin script, so that, for example, Hindi, Urdu, Bengali, and English are rendered largely the same in braille.

System

Although basically alphabetic, Bharati braille retains one aspect of Indian abugidas, in that the default vowel ''a'' is not written unless it occurs at the beginning of a syllable or before a vowel. This has been called a "linearized alphasyllabary abugida".Richard Sproat, ''Language, Technology, and Society'' For example, and taking Devanagari as a representative printed script, the braille letter (the consonant ''K'') renders print ''ka'', and braille (''TH'') renders print ''tha''. To indicate that a consonant occurs without a following vowel (as when followed by another consonant, or at the end of a syllable), a ''virama'' (vowel-canceling) prefix is used: (''virama-K'') is ''k'', and (''virama-TH'') is ''th''. However, unlike in print, there are no vowel diacritics in Bharati braille; vowels are written as full letters following the consonant, regardless of their order in print. For example, in print the vowel ''i'' is prefixed to a consonant in a reduced diacritic form, ''ki'', but in braille it follows the consonant in its full form: (''K-I''), equivalent to writing for ''ki'' in print. Thus print ''klika'' is written in braille as (''virama-K-L-I-K''). The one time a non-initial short ''a'' is written in braille is when it is followed by another vowel. In this environment the ''a'' must be written, because otherwise the subsequent vowel will be read as following the consonant immediately. Thus print ''kai'' is rendered in braille as (''K–A–I''), to disambiguate it from for ''ki''.

Apart from the ''kṣ'' and ''jñ'', Bharati braille does not handle conjuncts. Consonant clusters written as conjuncts in print are handled with the virama in braille, just as they are with computer fonts that lack the conjuncts. Bharati braille is thus equivalent to Grade-1 English braille, though there are plans to extend all the Bharati alphabets to include conjuncts.

Alphabet

Following are the charts of the braille correspondences of the main Indian scripts.UNESCO (2013
World Braille Usage
, 3rd edition. Irregularities, where a letter does not match the romanized heading, are placed in parentheses.

Codas

:In Hindi (written in Devanagari), ''halanta'' is not used with the last letter when a word ends in a consonant.

Punctuation

Some of the punctuation marks (comma, close quote) duplicate letters. The caps mark is only used when transcribing English.

The 'accent', , transcribes Urdu ّ ''shaddah (tashdeed)'', and the colon, , is also used for Urdu ة '' ta marbuta''.

In Bangladesh and Nepal, several additional punctuation marks are noted, but they do not agree with each other. It is not clear which are used in India. (See Bengali Braille and Nepali Braille.)

Pointing and Urdu

The pointing symbol, , is used for consonant letters that in print are derived by adding a dot to another consonant. For Urdu, the base letter in Devanagari is used: the pointing of the Arabic/Persian script is not reflected. For example, Gurmukhi / Urdu غ / Devanagari ''ġa '', formed by adding a dot to ''g'' in Gurmukhi and Devanagari, is written ''point-G'' in all three. With Urdu, this is only done in India.

Other languages

''Ethnologue'' 17 reports braille usage for Mizo, Garo, and Meitei. It is not clear if these are obsolete alphabets, or if they have been unified with Bharati Braille.

Digits

Digits follow international conventions and are marked by .

See also

* Moon type is a simplification of the Latin alphabet for embossing. An adaptation for "Hindustanee"-reading blind people as proposed.

References

{{Braille

*
French-ordered braille alphabets
Hindi