How is Chinese written in braille?

Vivian Aldridge

Contents of the page

• How the sounds are written
• Table of signs for the sounds
• Punctuation
• Table of punctiation signs
• Examples

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How the sounds are wirtten

Chinese braille is based on a phonetic representation of the sounds of the language. There are no braille signs for individual Chinese inkprint characters, only for sounds. Here the braille code for Putonghua, the Chinese National Language (sometimes also called Mandarin), is described. However, the same principles apply also other Chinese dialects.

As with all other braille codes, Chinese braille is read from left to right - whatever the direction of any inkprint original.

As a rule, in the inkprint one syllable is represented by one character. The same syllable in braille is written with one, two or three signs. There are three categories of these braille signs.

• initials: the consonants that are only found at the beginning of a syllable.
• finals: vowels (n, ng and r at the end of a syllable are not really consonants)
• tones: signs that indicate the tone of the word

The official Pinyin transcription system has been used in the table below. The letters often indicate different sounds than in English. For example, the letter "x" represents a sound roughly similar to the "sh" in the English word "sheep".

Some braille signs stand for two different sounds. This technique ist necessary because there are more sounds than different braille signs. However, it causes no problems because certain combinations of sounds never occur.

Examples

• g and j are written with the same sign. g is never found before an i; j is never found before an a. Thus g/j followed by iong must mean "jiong" and g/j followed by ao must mean "gao". (Perhaps this could be compared with Italian where g represents a different sound before e and i than before a, o and u.)
• i and yi are written with the same sign. Following a consonant this sign is read as i; if there is no consonant it is read as yi. wu/u is read as u following a consonant and wu when standing alone.

A word consists of one or more syllables. In inkprint the characters follow one another without any space between them. Thus the word boundaries aren't immediately apparent. In braille, however, a space is left between words. This is necessary: whereas the inkprint characters provide information about the meaning of a syllable, the braille signs only represent the sounds. In the context of the other sounds of a word, the meaning is almost always instantly clear - provided, of course, that the reader masters the spoken language.

Let us take the word "chuiju" as an example:

• Two of the meanings of "chui" are "cook" and "blow"
• "ju" can mean "distance", "utensil", "complete", "sentence" and more.

Each of these meanings is written with a different inkprint character. If the word boundaries weren't shown in the braille it would probably be difficult to know which were meant. Just the two syllables together can be immediately recognised as meaning "kitchen utensil".

In the few examples of Chinese braille that I have come across, the signs for the tones were not used except in the following cases:

• with the syllable yi, for which a good Chinese-German dictionary lists almost 50 different inkprint characters. In this case the indication of the tone helps to limit the number of possible meanings.
• in words where a syllable with a suppressed vowel comes before syllable without a consonant, for example the word sh'yong (try out, test) in which the braille sign for the fourth tone is used instead of the apostrope. In this case the tone sign seems to be used to separate the two syllables.

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Table of signs for the sounds

In the following table each row explains one Chinese braille sign:

• on the left is the meaning of the sign in English braille,
• in the middle are the dot numbers
• on the right is the meaning in Chinese

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Punktuation

Because so many braille signs are used for sounds, most of the puctuation marks consist of more than one braille sign. The majority of the punctuation seems to be an adaptation of the French signs with the dots moved half a sign to the right.

For example:

• In French braille the query (question mark) consists of dots 2 and 6 - the middle dot on the left and the bottom dot on the right. In Chinese braille it consists of dot 5 and dot 3 - the middle dot on the right and then the bottom dot on the left of the next sign.
• Louis Braille wrote the period (full stop) with dots 2, 5 and 6 (the middle dot on the left and the two lower dots on the right). Chinese uses dot 5 and dots 2 and 3 (the middle dot on the right and the two lower dots on the left-hand side of the next sign).

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Table of punctuation signs

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Examples

In the inkprint transcription of these examples (an adaptation of Pinyin), the tone is represented by numbers immediately following the syllable. [The braille in the alternative descriptions of the graphics is written in the European "Eurobraille" computer code.]

• "braille publishing house":
  "mang2wen2 shu1she4" (literally: blind-writing book-society)
  

• "once, short", "less than, under" und "try out, test":
  "yi1xia4", "yi3xia4" und sh4yong4 (shi4yong4)
  

• "Please wait a moment!"
  "Qing3 ni3 deng3 yi1xia4!"
  

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©Vivian Aldridge (German original: 2000.04.03; translation 2002.04.20/2003.01.05)