I need to practice my calligraphic dots and circles, so today’s character comes from Braille.
Did you know that Braille is slightly different in every language? The twenty-six letters of the Latin alphabet are generally the same across languages, but beyond that there is a lot of variation. For example, I wrote ⠩, which represents:
- the digraph “sh” or the word “shall” in English Braille,
- sounds similar to “sh” in Devanagari Braille (श) and Arabic Braille (ش),
- the accented letter î in French Braille,
- the digraph “ei” in German Braille and its equivalent “ει” in Greek Braille, and
- nothing at all in Spanish Braille!
Chinese, Japanese, and Korean have their own entirely independent Brailles. The symbol ⠩ represents the syllable く (ku) in Japanese Braille, the final “yan” in Mainland Chinese Braille, and the vowel ㅠ (yu) in Korean Braille.