Tuesday, September 21, 1999
The 1990 edition of 'World Braille Usage' (published by Unesco and the
Library of Congress's National Library Service for the Blind and
Physically Handicapped but now out of print) has Braille code assignments
for the following scripts: Latin, Arabic, Cyrillic, Chinese (phoneitc
see below), Greek, Devanagari, Gujarati, Marathi, Telugu, Tamil, Kannada,
Malayalam, Bengali, Oriya, Gumurkhi, Gaelic, Hebrew, Japan (kana) Korean,
Sinhala and Thai. It is arranged by country and since several countries
may use the same script several scripts are repeated, quite possibly
without the the same code used for the same letter in all cases.
The China (mandarin, pages 18-19) part assigns 18 codes for initial
consonants, 34 codes for finals, 4 for tones and 6 for punctuation; total
62 codes. The Hong Kong (Cantonese, pages 30-31) part assigns has 19 codes
for initials, 53 for finals, 8 for tones and 9 for punctuation: total 89.
So there is some overlap in the latter--e.g., the same code (top
four dots) is used for one sound (ligature nj (U+014B)) in initial and
final position and for the same following a small turned 'a' (U+0250) in
final poisiton. Two tones also have the same code--no dots.
Don't ask me any more, I read neither Chinese nor Braille and this
is, I admit, somewhat remote from Unicode.
Regards,
Jim Agenbroad ( jage@LOC.gov )
The above are purely personal opinions, not necessarily the official
views of any government or any agency of any.
Phone: 202 707-9612; Fax: 202 707-0955; US mail: I.T.S. Dev.Gp.4, Library
of Congress, 101 Independence Ave. SE, Washington, D.C. 20540-9334 U.S.A.
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.2 : Tue Jul 10 2001 - 17:20:53 EDT