page_title: Japanese Braille
section_title: Formatting
hierarchical_section_title: Japanese Braille / Formatting
caption_attribution_description: 日本語: 近鉄50000系車内の点字表記
context_page_description: Japanese Braille is the braille script of the Japanese language. It is based on the original braille script, though the connection is tenuous. In Japanese it is known as tenji, literally "dot characters". It transcribes Japanese more or less as it would be written in the hiragana or katakana syllabaries, without any provision for writing kanji.
  Japanese Braille is a vowel-based abugida. That is, the glyphs are syllabic, but unlike kana they contain separate symbols for consonant and vowel, and the vowel takes primacy. The vowels are written in the upper left corner and may be used alone. The consonants are written in the lower right corner and cannot occur alone. However, the semivowel y is indicated by point 4, one of the vowel points, and the vowel combination is dropped to the bottom of the block. When this point is written in isolation, it indicates that the following syllable has a medial y, as in mya. Syllables beginning with w are indicated by dropping the vowel points to the bottom of the cell without additional consonant points.
context_section_description: Western letters and digits are indicated as follows:
  An additional sign indicates that the following characters are specifically English words and not just in the Latin alphabet.
  Words immediately follow numbers, unless they begin with a vowel or with r-.  Because the syllables a i u e o and ra ri ru re ro are homographic with the digits 0–9, a hyphen is inserted to separate them.  Thus 6人 "six people" (6 nin) is written without a hyphen, ⠼⠋⠇⠴ ⟨6nin⟩, but 6円 "six yen" (6 en) is written with a hyphen, ⠼⠋⠤⠋⠴ ⟨6-en⟩, because ⠼⠋⠋⠴ would be read as ⟨66n⟩.
caption: At left, Japanese print and braille text.  The embossed text includes non-braille lines, bullets, and an arrow. At right, an illustration of Western digits and letters.
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