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American Braille

Braille alphabet used in the US before the adoption of standardized English braille

Braille alphabet used in the US before the adoption of standardized English braille

FieldValue
nameAmerican Braille
altnameModified Braille
typeAlphabet
time1878–1918
languagesEnglish
fam1Braille
fam2(re-ordered)
printEnglish alphabet
ipa-noteno

| ipa-note = no

American Braille was a popular braille alphabet used in the United States before the adoption of standardized English Braille in 1918. It was developed by Joel W. Smith, a blind piano tuning teacher at Perkins Institution for the Blind in Boston, and introduced in 1878 as Modified Braille. In 1900 it was renamed American Braille.

Rather than ordering the letters numerically, as was done in French Braille and the (reordered) English Braille also used in the US at the time, in American Braille the letters were partially reassigned by frequency, with the most-common letters being written with the fewest dots. This significantly improved writing speed with the slate and stylus, which wrote one dot at a time, but lost its advantage with the braille typewriters that became practical after 1950.

American Braille was the alphabet used by Helen Keller.

Letters

In numerical order and with their modern French and English Braille equivalents, the letters are:

LetterAmerican
Braille value*French/British
Braille value*LetterAmerican
Braille value*French/British
Braille value*
a**t****r**d**o**f
*b**c**e**k*
**k**uv**j****x****b**
*r**y**à · of**ê · gh**î · sh**ï · er*

Not quite half of the letters retained their French Braille values.

Punctuation

Punctuation was as follows. Comma, semicolon, and parentheses were the same as in English Braille.

PunctuationAmerican
Braille value*French/British
Braille value*
Caps}} prefixed to a word capitalized it; suffixed to a word it was a period.,
*-*()*.*

References

Sources

  • {{cite book

References

  1. The New York Institute for Special Education, ''[http://www.nyise.org/blind/america2.htm American Modified Braille] {{Webarchive. link. (1996-10-18 '')
  2. {{angle bracket. {{bc. ⠤ prefixed to a word capitalized it; suffixed to a word it was a period.
  3. Doubled ({{bc. ⠒. ⠒) for a dash
  4. Apostrophe only. Single quotation marks were {{bc. ⠦. ⠦.
  5. Doubled ({{bc. ⠦. ⠦) for single quotation marks. The reason for this was that in the US, single quotation marks were less frequent, being used where double quotation marks were in Britain.
Info: Wikipedia Source

This article was imported from Wikipedia and is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Content has been adapted to SurfDoc format. Original contributors can be found on the article history page.

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