English Braille
It consists of around 250 letters (phonograms), numerals, punctuation, formatting marks, contractions, and abbreviations (logograms).Grade 2, which is nearly universal beyond basic literacy materials, abandons one-to-one transcription in many places (such as the letter ⠡ ⟨ch⟩) and adds hundreds of abbreviations and contractions.[3] Some of the differences with Unified English Braille, which was officially adopted by various countries between 2005 and 2012, are discussed at the end.In 1876, a French-based system with a few hundred English contractions and abbreviations was adopted as the predominant script in Great Britain.However, the contractions and abbreviations proved unsatisfactory, and in 1902 the current grade-2 system, called Revised Braille, was adopted in the British Commonwealth.In the United States at the time, three scripts were used: non-braille New York Point; American Braille, which was reordered so that the most frequent letters were the ones with the fewest dots; and a variation of English Braille, which was reordered to match the English alphabet, assigning the values wxyz to the letters that, in France and England, stood for xyzç.[7] The concessions were to swap the British two-dot capital sign with the one-dot emphasis sign, which had generally been omitted anyway (as capitals had been in New York Point), to drop a few religious contractions from general usage, and to introduce a rule stating that contractions and abbreviations should not span "major" syllable boundaries.The chief differences with Revised Braille are in punctuation, symbols, and formatting, more accurately reflecting print conventions in matters such as brackets, mathematical notation, and typefaces.There are numerous conventions for when a print sequence is "contracted" this way in braille, and when it is spelled out in full.Generally, other ligatures should not be used if they might cause problems with legibility, as with the ing in lingerie, though they tend to be with familiar words, such as ginger and finger, even if their pronunciation is divided between syllables.The rules state that they should not span a prefix and stem either, so for example the ed in deduce, the er of rerun and derail, and the ble of sublet should be written out in full.[14] The of in professor, for example, might not be recognized spanning prefix and stem, and often a-cc-ept or a-dd-r-e-s-s are accepted, despite the technical violation.[16] Also, it is normal to use the letter ⟨ea⟩ for the broken vowel in i-d-ea-s or c-r-ea-t-e, despite it being pronounced as two sounds rather than one as in head or ocean.If the print letters span an obvious affix, the braille ligature is not used (preamble, reanalyze, pineapple, subbasement), but they are used in words such as accept and address where the morphology has become opaque.The accent mark ⟨⠈⟩ (printed hereinafter with the character @) shows that there is a diacritic on the following letter, as in ⟨se@nor⟩ señor, ⟨fa@cade⟩ façade, ⟨caf@e⟩ café, ⟨na@ive⟩ naïve, and ⟨@angstr@om⟩ ångström.In normal braille text, noting the precise diacritic is not important, as it can be easily understood from context, or simply ignored.For example, señor is not written with the ligature ⟨en⟩ as *⟨s-@-en-o-r⟩, because it would not be clear if the accent were supposed to be on the e (as é) or on the n. However, English words are contracted.Braille punctuation is somewhat variable, just as there is variation in printed English between curly and straight quotation marks.[19] When words or letters are replaced by multiple dashes or dots in print, in EBAE ⠤⠤⠤⠤ and ⠄⠄⠄⠄ are used, with a matching number of characters.[21] Unlike the asterisk in printed English, it is spaced on both sides, apart from associated footnote letters or numbers, which follow it immediately.The accent mark (here called the print symbol indicator) is used with punctuation when it stands alone, rather than suffixed to a word or number.In EBAE, "in general literature, the common mathematical signs of operation for + (plus), − (minus), × (times or by), ÷ (divided by), and = (equals) should always be expressed in words.However, this is misleading: an actual printed # is rendered in braille as ⟨No.⟩, without an intervening space before the number sign ⠼.If instead 4a is intended (as in a section or apartment number), then the letter sign is used to force a reading of a rather than 1 for the final character: ⠼⠙⠰⠁ ⟨4a⟩.[29] Apart from words using the various abbreviations signs, covered in the next section, English Braille utilizes a number of unmarked contractions.(These must be spelled g-r-and-ch-i-l-d and with-ou-t.) However, a following apostrophe is acceptable: ⟨p's⟩ people's, ⟨c't⟩ can't, ⟨x'll⟩ it'll;[35] as are hyphenated words like so-and-so.This behavior is distinct from ligatures such as ⠫ ⟨ed⟩ and ⠮ ⟨the⟩, which are used when the equivalent sequences are found in printed English, as in ⠗⠫ red and ⠝⠑⠫ need.In 1993, the UEB project was adopted by the International Council on English Braille, and expanded to cover the various national systems of the member states: Australia, Canada, New Zealand, Nigeria, South Africa, the United Kingdom, and the United States.An additional goal became adoption of a single standard for all braille encoding, apart from music; with the exception of math-notation, this was largely achieved.The following text is the same in American Grade 2 and Unified English Braille: Article 1 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights