Irish Braille is the
braille
Braille ( , ) is a Tactile alphabet, tactile writing system used by blindness, blind or visually impaired people. It can be read either on embossed paper or by using refreshable braille displays that connect to computers and smartphone device ...
alphabet of the
Irish language
Irish (Standard Irish: ), also known as Irish Gaelic or simply Gaelic ( ), is a Celtic language of the Indo-European language family. It is a member of the Goidelic languages of the Insular Celtic sub branch of the family and is indigenous ...
. It is augmented by specifically Irish letters for vowels with
acute accents in print:
:
''é'' and ''ú'' are coincidentally the
French Braille
French Braille is the original braille alphabet, and the basis of :Innovative braille scripts, almost :French-ordered braille scripts, all others. The collation, alphabetic order of French has become the basis of the international braille conven ...
letters for ''é'' and ''ù'': They are simply the braille letters of the third decade after ''z'', assigned to print in alphabetical order.
Irish Braille also uses some of the Grade- shortcuts of
English 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 ...
,
:
* only has the value ''ar'' in prose. In poetry, it is used to mark a new line, like "/" in print.
†Abolished in Updated Irish Braille (see below)
These shortcuts are not used across elements of compound words. For example, in ''uiscerian'' (uisce-rian) "aqueduct", ''e-r'' is spelled out, as is ''s-t'' in ''trastomhas'' (tras-tomhas) "diameter". There are no special braille letters for dotted consonants. The letter ''h'' is used instead, as in modern print. A shortcut may be used even when the final consonant is lenited with ''h''; ''comh'', for example, is written ''com-h''.
The only word-sign is the letter ''s'' for ''agus'' "and".
Traditionally the letters ''j k q v w x y z'' were not part of the
Irish alphabet, but apart from ''w'' they have been introduced through English loans, so they occur in Irish Braille. Punctuation is the same as in English Braille.
Updated Irish Braille
In 2014, the
Irish National Braille and Alternative Format Association approved a new standard, Updated Irish Braille (UIB), designed largely to match
Unified English Braille
Unified English Braille Code (UEBC, formerly UBC, now usually simply UEB) is an English language Braille code standard, developed to encompass the wide variety of literary and technical material in use in the English-speaking world today, in unifor ...
for ease of use by bilingual braille readers.
UIB uses most of the contractions of UEB, with the exception of the doubled letters bb , cc , ff , and gg . These must be written as , , , and respectively. The contractions used are as shown above.
A full set of wordsigns has been added:
(Even when a lenited letter requires two cells, it is treated as one letter in Irish.) In addition, the letters ''a'', ''i'', ''á'', ''é'', ''í'', and ''ó'', along with the digraphs ''in'' and ''ar'', are Irish words in their own right, and are treated as wordsigns.
The third-decade English wordsigns ''and'', ''for'', ''of'', ''the'', and ''with'' are not used as wordsigns nor as contractions. The first three are spelled out , , and , while the last two use the ''th'' contraction and . All occurrences of in UIB text are for vowels with accents.
The only shortform word in UIB is ''b-r-l'' "braille".
References
*''Standard Irish (Gaeilge) Braille 2010'',
National Council for the Blind of IrelandUpdated Irish Braille (UIB) Information , INBAF
{{Irish_linguistics
French-ordered braille alphabets
Irish language