Esperanto Braille


Esperanto Braille is the braille alphabet of the Esperanto language. One Esperanto Braille magazine, Aŭroro, has been published since 1920, and another, Esperanta Ligilo, since 1904.

Alphabet

The basic braille alphabet is extended for the print letters with diacritics. The circumflex is marked by adding dot 6 to the base letter: ĉ, ĝ, ĥ, ĵ, ŝ. Therefore, the letter ĵ has the same form as the unused French/English Braille letter w; to write a w in a foreign name, dot 3 is added: w . Esperanto ŭ is made by reflecting u, so that dot 1 becomes dot 4: ŭ.
The alphabet is thus as follows.

a
b
c
ĉ
d
e
f

g
ĝ
h
ĥ
i
j
ĵ

k
l
m
n
o
p
r

s
ŝ
t
u
ŭ
v
z

Contracted braille is in limited use.

Transcribing foreign letters

Beside the basic-Latin foreign letters q, w, x, y, there are dedicated letters for the umlauted vowels that occur in print German, ä, ö, ü:

q
w
x
y
ä
ö
ü

Additional accented letters in other languages are handled by separate braille cells for the diacritics. These do not have a one-to-one correspondence with print:

◌́

◌̀, ◌̄
◌̃
◌̂, ◌̌
◌̈, ◌̇
◌̊, ◌̆
◌̧, ◌̨, ◌̣, ◌̩
◌̸, ◌̵, etc.

These conventions are used for foreign names adapted to Esperanto Braille. Unassimilated text in another braille alphabet is indicated by the code.

Punctuation

;Single punctuation
The apostrophe and abbreviation point are both transcribed, which is distinct from the period/stop,.
;Paired punctuation



Quotation marks in print Esperanto are highly variable, and tend to follow the conventions of the country a text is published in. This is irrelevant for printing in braille.

Numbers

The apostrophe/abbreviation point is used to group digits within numbers, like the comma in English. In both print and braille Esperanto, the comma is used as the decimal mark, so:

Formatting

Capitals are only marked for proper names and at the beginning of a sentence.
For emphasis, a simple is used to mark each of one to three words. For longer emphatic text, there are two formats: Either a colon precedes the simple emphatic sign,, and an additional sign is placed before the last emphasized word, or the sign is placed before and after the emphasized text.
In contracted braille, a different sign is used for capital letters, . As in most braille orthographies, proper names are not contracted, and words preceded by this sign are not contracted in Esperanto Braille.