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Grade 2 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 Braille letters, such as , correspond to more than one letter in print. There are three levels of complexity in English Braille. Grade 1 is a nearly one-to-one transcription of printed English and is restricted to basic literacy. Grade 2, which is nearly universal beyond basic literacy materials, abandons one-to-one transcription in many places (such as the letter ) and adds hundreds of abbreviations and contractions. Both Grade 1 and Grade 2 have been standardized. "Grade 3" is any of various personal shorthands that are almost never found in publications. Most of this article describes the 1994 American edition of Grade 2 Braille, which is largely equivalent to British Grade 2 Braille. Some of the differences with Unified English Braill ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Alphabet
An alphabet is a standard set of letter (alphabet), letters written to represent particular sounds in a spoken language. Specifically, letters largely correspond to phonemes as the smallest sound segments that can distinguish one word from another in a given language. Not all writing systems represent language in this way: a syllabary assigns symbols to spoken syllables, while logographies assign symbols to words, morphemes, or other semantic units. The first letters were invented in Ancient Egypt to serve as an aid in writing Egyptian hieroglyphs; these are referred to as Egyptian uniliteral signs by lexicographers. This system was used until the 5th century AD, and fundamentally differed by adding pronunciation hints to existing hieroglyphs that had previously carried no pronunciation information. Later on, these phonemic symbols also became used to transcribe foreign words. The first fully phonemic script was the Proto-Sinaitic script, also descending from Egyptian hi ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
British Commonwealth
The Commonwealth of Nations, often referred to as the British Commonwealth or simply the Commonwealth, is an international association of 56 member states, the vast majority of which are former territories of the British Empire The British Empire comprised the dominions, Crown colony, colonies, protectorates, League of Nations mandate, mandates, and other Dependent territory, territories ruled or administered by the United Kingdom and its predecessor states. It bega ... from which it developed. They are connected through their English in the Commonwealth of Nations, use of the English language and cultural and historical ties. The chief institutions of the organisation are the Commonwealth Secretariat, which focuses on intergovernmental relations, and the Commonwealth Foundation, which focuses on non-governmental relations between member nations. Numerous List of Commonwealth organisations, organisations are associated with and operate within the Commonwealth. The Com ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Dash
The dash is a punctuation mark consisting of a long horizontal line. It is similar in appearance to the hyphen but is longer and sometimes higher from the baseline. The most common versions are the endash , generally longer than the hyphen but shorter than the minus sign; the emdash , longer than either the en dash or the minus sign; and the horizontalbar , whose length varies across typefaces but tends to be between those of the en and em dashes. Typical uses of dashes are to mark a break in a sentence, to set off an explanatory remark (similar to parenthesis), or to show spans of time or ranges of values. The em dash is sometimes used as a leading character to identify the source of a quoted text. History In the early 17th century, in Okes-printed plays of William Shakespeare, dashes are attested that indicate a thinking pause, interruption, mid-speech realization, or change of subject. The dashes are variously longer (as in '' King Lear'' reprinted 1619) or ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Diacritic
A diacritic (also diacritical mark, diacritical point, diacritical sign, or accent) is a glyph added to a letter or to a basic glyph. The term derives from the Ancient Greek (, "distinguishing"), from (, "to distinguish"). The word ''diacritic'' is a noun, though it is sometimes used in an attributive sense, whereas ''diacritical'' is only an adjective. Some diacritics, such as the acute , grave , and circumflex (all shown above an 'o'), are often called ''accents''. Diacritics may appear above or below a letter or in some other position such as within the letter or between two letters. The main use of diacritics in Latin script is to change the sound-values of the letters to which they are added. Historically, English has used the diaeresis diacritic to indicate the correct pronunciation of ambiguous words, such as "coöperate", without which the letter sequence could be misinterpreted to be pronounced . Other examples are the acute and grave accents, which can indica ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Acronym
An acronym is a type of abbreviation consisting of a phrase whose only pronounced elements are the initial letters or initial sounds of words inside that phrase. Acronyms are often spelled with the initial Letter (alphabet), letter of each word in all caps with no punctuation. For some, an initialism or alphabetism connotes this general meaning, and an ''acronym'' is a subset with a narrower definition; an acronym is pronounced as a word rather than as a sequence of letters. In this sense, ''NASA'' () is an acronym, but ''United States, USA'' () is not. The broader sense of ''acronym'', ignoring pronunciation, is its original meaning and in common use. . Dictionary and style-guide editors dispute whether the term ''acronym'' can be legitimately applied to abbreviations which are not pronounced as words, and they do not agree on acronym space (punctuation), spacing, letter case, casing, and punctuation. The phrase that the acronym stands for is called its . The of an acron ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Broken Vowel
In historical linguistics, vowel breaking, vowel fracture, or diphthongization is the sound change of a monophthong into a diphthong or triphthong. Types Vowel breaking may be unconditioned or conditioned. It may be triggered by the presence of another sound, by stress, or in no particular way. Assimilation Vowel breaking is sometimes defined as a subtype of diphthongization, when it refers to harmonic ( assimilatory) process that involves diphthongization triggered by a following vowel or consonant. The original pure vowel typically breaks into two segments. The first segment matches the original vowel, and the second segment is harmonic with the nature of the triggering vowel or consonant. For example, the second segment may be (a back vowel) if the following vowel or consonant is back (such as velar or pharyngeal), and the second segment may be (a front vowel) if the following vowel or consonant is front (such as palatal). Thus, vowel breaking, in the restricted sense, ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Digraph (orthography)
A digraph () or digram is a pair of character (symbol), characters used in the orthography of a language to write either a single phoneme (distinct sound), or a sequence of phonemes that does not correspond to the normal values of the two characters combined. Some digraphs represent phonemes that cannot be represented with a single character in the writing system of a language, like in Spanish ''chico'' and ''ocho''. Other digraphs represent phonemes that can also be represented by single characters. A digraph that shares its pronunciation with a single character may be a relic from an earlier period of the language when the digraph had a different pronunciation, or may represent a distinction that is made only in certain dialects, like the English . Some such digraphs are used for purely etymology, etymological reasons, like in French. In some orthographies, digraphs (and occasionally trigraph (orthography), trigraphs) are considered individual letter (alphabet), letters, w ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Typographic Ligature
In writing and typography, a ligature occurs where two or more graphemes or letters are joined to form a single glyph. Examples are the characters and used in English and French, in which the letters and are joined for the first ligature and the letters and are joined for the second ligature. For stylistic and legibility reasons, and are often merged to create (where the tittle on the merges with the hood of the ); the same is true of and to create . The common ampersand, , developed from a ligature in which the handwritten Latin letters and (spelling , Latin for 'and') were combined. History The earliest known script Sumerian cuneiform and Egyptian hieratic both include many cases of character combinations that gradually evolve from ligatures into separately recognizable characters. Other notable ligatures, such as the Brahmic abugidas and the Germanic bind rune, figure prominently throughout ancient manuscripts. These new glyphs emerge alongside the p ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Abbreviations
An abbreviation () is a shortened form of a word or phrase, by any method including shortening, contraction, initialism (which includes acronym), or crasis. An abbreviation may be a shortened form of a word, usually ended with a trailing period. For example, the term ''etc.'' is the usual abbreviation for the Latin phrase . Types A '' contraction'' is an abbreviation formed by replacing letters with an apostrophe. Examples include ''I'm'' for ''I am'' and ''li'l'' for ''little''. An ''initialism'' or ''acronym'' is an abbreviation consisting of the initial letter of a sequence of words without other punctuation. For example, FBI ( ), USA ( ), IBM ( ), BBC ( ). When initialism is used as the preferred term, acronym refers more specifically to when the abbreviation is pronounced as a word rather than as separate letters; examples include SWAT and NASA. Initialisms, contractions and crasis share some semantic and phonetic functions, and are connected by the term ''abbreviat ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Formatting Marks
Format may refer to: Printing and visual media * Text formatting, the typesetting of text elements * Paper formats, or paper size standards * Newspaper format, the size of the paper page Computing * File format, particular way that information is encoded for storage in a computer file ** Document file format, for storing documents on a storage media, especially for use by computer ** Audio file format, for storing digital audio data on a computer system ** Video file format, for storing digital video data on a computer system * Content format, encoded format for converting a specific type of data to displayable information * Disk formatting, preparing computer hard disks to store data, destroying any existing contents ** FORMAT (command), a command-line utility to format disks in many computer operating systems * Format (Common Lisp), a programming function for formatting printed output * Format (Fortran 66), a programming statement for formatting printed output * Format ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
ISO Basic Latin Alphabet
The ISO basic Latin alphabet is an international standard (beginning with ISO/IEC 646) for a Latin-script alphabet that consists of two sets (uppercase and lowercase) of 26 letters, codified in various national and international standards and used widely in international communication. They are the same letters that comprise the current English alphabet. Since medieval times, they are also the same letters of the modern Latin alphabet. The order is also important for sorting words into alphabetical order. The two sets contain the following 26 letters each: History By the 1960s it became apparent to the computer and telecommunications industries in the First World that a non-proprietary method of encoding characters was needed. The International Organization for Standardization (ISO) encapsulated the Latin script in their ( ISO/IEC 646) 7-bit character-encoding standard. To achieve widespread acceptance, this encapsulation was based on popular usage. The standard was ba ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Word Divider
In punctuation, a word divider is a form of glyph which separates written words. In languages which use the Latin, Cyrillic, and Arabic alphabets, as well as other scripts of Europe and West Asia, the word divider is a blank space, or ''whitespace''. This convention is spreading, along with other aspects of European punctuation, to Asia and Africa, where words are usually written without word separation. In character encoding, word segmentation depends on which characters are defined as word dividers. History In Ancient Egyptian, determinatives may have been used as much to demarcate word boundaries as to disambiguate the semantics of words. Rarely in Assyrian cuneiform, but commonly in the later cuneiform Ugaritic alphabet, a vertical stroke 𒑰 was used to separate words. In Old Persian cuneiform, a diagonally sloping wedge 𐏐 was used. As the alphabet spread throughout the ancient world, words were often run together without division, and this practice remains or rem ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
