American Braille
| American Braille Modified Braille |
|
|---|---|
| Type | alphabet |
| Languages | English |
| Time period | 1878–1918 |
| Parent systems |
Braille
|
American Braille was a popular braille alphabet used in the United States before the adoption of standardized English braille in 1918. It was the alphabet used by Helen Keller. 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 assigned by frequency, with the simplest braille letters being the most common. This significantly improved writing speed with dot-by-dot slate and stylus technology, but lost its advantage with braille typewriters, which became practical after 1950.
Letters[edit]
In numerical order, and with French and English Braille equivalents in parentheses,[1] the letters are:[2]
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
| a | t (b) |
r (c) |
d | o (e) |
f | g | h | i | s (k) |
l | m | q | k (r) |
u | v | j (y) |
x (à · of) |
b (ê · gh) |
p (î · sh) |
z (ï · er) |
w | e (, · ea) |
y (@ · ar) |
n (NA · -ing) |
c (j) |
Not quite half of the letters retained their French Braille values.
Punctuation was as follows. Comma, semicolon, and parentheses were the same as in English Braille.
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
|
| Caps (-) |
. [3] (-) |
, | ; | : (NA) |
? (.) |
! (with) |
- [4] (:) |
( ) | ’ [5] (accent) |
" [6] (?) |
References[edit]
- ^ English digraph equivalents did not necessarily exist at the time.
- ^ The New York Institute for Special Education, American Modified Braille
- ^ ⠤ prefixed to a word capitalized it; suffixed to a word it was a period.
- ^ Doubled (⠒⠒) for a dash
- ^ Apostrophe only. Single quotation marks were ⠦⠦.
- ^ Doubled (⠦⠦) 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.
|
|||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
