In a written language , a logogram (from Ancient Greek logos 'word', and gramma 'that which is drawn or written'), also logograph or lexigraph , is a written character that represents a semantic component of a language, such as a word or morpheme . Chinese characters as used in Chinese as well as other languages are logograms, as are Egyptian hieroglyphs and characters in cuneiform script . A writing system that primarily uses logograms is called a logography . Non-logographic writing systems, such as alphabets and syllabaries , are phonemic : their individual symbols represent sounds directly and lack any inherent meaning. However, all known logographies have some phonetic component, generally based on the rebus principle , and the addition of a phonetic component to pure ideographs is considered to be a key innovation in enabling the writing system to adequately encode human language.
75-404: Braille ( / ˈ b r eɪ l / BRAYL , French: [bʁɑj] ) is a tactile writing system used by people who are visually impaired . It can be read either on embossed paper or by using refreshable braille displays that connect to computers and smartphone devices. Braille can be written using a slate and stylus , a braille writer , an electronic braille notetaker or with
150-400: A braille embosser (printer) or a refreshable braille display (screen). Braille has been extended to an 8-dot code , particularly for use with braille embossers and refreshable braille displays. In 8-dot braille the additional dots are added at the bottom of the cell, giving a matrix 4 dots high by 2 dots wide. The additional dots are given the numbers 7 (for the lower-left dot) and 8 (for
225-524: A word space . Dot configurations can be used to represent a letter, digit, punctuation mark, or even a word. Early braille education is crucial to literacy, education and employment among the blind. Despite the evolution of new technologies, including screen reader software that reads information aloud, braille provides blind people with access to spelling, punctuation and other aspects of written language less accessible through audio alone. While some have suggested that audio-based technologies will decrease
300-454: A disadvantage for processing homophones in English. The processing disadvantage in English is usually described in terms of the relative lack of homophones in the English language. When a homophonic word is encountered, the phonological representation of that word is first activated. However, since this is an ambiguous stimulus, a matching at the orthographic/lexical ("mental dictionary") level
375-422: A disadvantage in processing, as has been the case with English homophones, but found no evidence for this. It is evident that there is a difference in how homophones are processed in logographically coded and alphabetically coded languages, but whether the advantage for processing of homophones in the logographically coded languages Japanese and Chinese (i.e. their writing systems) is due to the logographic nature of
450-516: A fixed combination of a radical that indicates its nominal category, plus a phonetic to give an idea of the pronunciation. The Mayan system used logograms with phonetic complements like the Egyptian, while lacking ideographic components. Chinese scholars have traditionally classified the Chinese characters ( hànzì ) into six types by etymology. The first two types are "single-body", meaning that
525-457: A greater number of symbols. (See Gardner–Salinas braille codes .) Luxembourgish Braille has adopted eight-dot cells for general use; for example, accented letters take the unaccented versions plus dot 8. Braille was the first writing system with binary encoding . The system as devised by Braille consists of two parts: Within an individual cell, the dot positions are arranged in two columns of three positions. A raised dot can appear in any of
600-405: A maximum of 42 cells per line (its margins are adjustable), and typical paper allows 25 lines per page. A large interlining Stainsby has 36 cells per line and 18 lines per page. An A4-sized Marburg braille frame, which allows interpoint braille (dots on both sides of the page, offset so they do not interfere with each other), has 30 cells per line and 27 lines per page. A Braille writing machine
675-660: A picture of an elephant, which is pronounced zou in Japanese, before being presented with the Chinese character 造 , which is also read zou . No effect of phonologically related context pictures were found for the reaction times for reading Chinese words. A comparison of the (partially) logographically coded languages Japanese and Chinese is interesting because whereas the Japanese language consists of more than 60% homographic heterophones (characters that can be read two or more different ways), most Chinese characters only have one reading. Because both languages are logographically coded,
750-463: A practical limitation in the number of input keys. There exist various input methods for entering logograms, either by breaking them up into their constituent parts such as with the Cangjie and Wubi methods of typing Chinese, or using phonetic systems such as Bopomofo or Pinyin where the word is entered as pronounced and then selected from a list of logograms matching it. While the former method
825-429: A recent reconstruction by William H. Baxter and Laurent Sagart – but sound changes in the intervening 3,000 years or so (including two different dialectal developments, in the case of the last two characters) have resulted in radically different pronunciations. Within the context of the Chinese language, Chinese characters (known as hanzi ) by and large represent words and morphemes rather than pure ideas; however,
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#1732802307384900-460: A relatively robust immunity to the effect of context stimuli, Verdschot et al. found that Japanese homophones seem particularly sensitive to these types of effects. Specifically, reaction times were shorter when participants were presented with a phonologically related picture before being asked to read a target character out loud. An example of a phonologically related stimulus from the study would be for instance when participants were presented with
975-429: A semantic/ideographic component (see ideogram ), called "determinatives" in the case of Egyptian and "radicals" in the case of Chinese. Typical Egyptian usage was to augment a logogram, which may potentially represent several words with different pronunciations, with a determinate to narrow down the meaning, and a phonetic component to specify the pronunciation. In the case of Chinese, the vast majority of characters are
1050-549: A significant extent in writing even if they do not write in Standard Chinese . Therefore, in China, Vietnam, Korea, and Japan before modern times, communication by writing ( 筆談 ) was the norm of East Asian international trade and diplomacy using Classical Chinese . This separation, however, also has the great disadvantage of requiring the memorization of the logograms when learning to read and write, separately from
1125-609: A space-saving mechanism; and grade 3 – various non-standardized personal stenographies that are less commonly used. In addition to braille text (letters, punctuation, contractions), it is also possible to create embossed illustrations and graphs, with the lines either solid or made of series of dots, arrows, and bullets that are larger than braille dots. A full braille cell includes six raised dots arranged in two columns, each column having three dots. The dot positions are identified by numbers from one to six. There are 64 possible combinations, including no dots at all for
1200-615: A system much more like shorthand. Today, there are braille codes for over 133 languages. In English, some variations in the braille codes have traditionally existed among English-speaking countries. In 1991, work to standardize the braille codes used in the English-speaking world began. Unified English Braille (UEB) has been adopted in all seven member countries of the International Council on English Braille (ICEB) as well as Nigeria. For blind readers, braille
1275-469: A text interfered with following the alignment of the letters, and consequently made texts more difficult to read than Braille's more arbitrary letter assignment. Finally, there are braille scripts that do not order the codes numerically at all, such as Japanese Braille and Korean Braille , which are based on more abstract principles of syllable composition. Texts are sometimes written in a script of eight dots per cell rather than six, enabling them to encode
1350-881: A two-million-word sample. As for the case of traditional Chinese characters, 4,808 characters are listed in the " Chart of Standard Forms of Common National Characters " ( 常用國字標準字體表 ) by the Ministry of Education of the Republic of China , while 4,759 in the " List of Graphemes of Commonly-Used Chinese Characters " ( 常用字字形表 ) by the Education and Manpower Bureau of Hong Kong , both of which are intended to be taught during elementary and junior secondary education. Education after elementary school includes not as many new characters as new words, which are mostly combinations of two or more already learned characters. Entering complex characters can be cumbersome on electronic devices due to
1425-449: Is (linearly) faster, it is more difficult to learn. With the Chinese alphabet system however, the strokes forming the logogram are typed as they are normally written, and the corresponding logogram is then entered. Also due to the number of glyphs, in programming and computing in general, more memory is needed to store each grapheme, as the character set is larger. As a comparison, ISO 8859 requires only one byte for each grapheme, while
1500-602: Is a typewriter with six keys that allows the user to write braille on a regular hard copy page. The first Braille typewriter to gain general acceptance was invented by Frank Haven Hall (Superintendent of the Illinois School for the Blind ), and was presented to the public in 1892. The Stainsby Brailler, developed by Henry Stainsby in 1903, is a mechanical writer with a sliding carriage that moves over an aluminium plate as it embosses Braille characters. An improved version
1575-594: Is an example of an alphabetic script that was designed to replace the logogrammatic hanja in order to increase literacy. The latter is now rarely used, but retains some currency in South Korea, sometimes in combination with hangul. According to government-commissioned research, the most commonly used 3,500 characters listed in the People's Republic of China 's " Chart of Common Characters of Modern Chinese " ( 现代汉语常用字表 , Xiàndài Hànyǔ Chángyòngzì Biǎo ) cover 99.48% of
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#17328023073841650-523: Is an independent writing system, rather than a code of printed orthography. Braille is derived from the Latin alphabet, albeit indirectly. In Braille's original system, the dot patterns were assigned to letters according to their position within the alphabetic order of the French alphabet of the time, with accented letters and w sorted at the end. Unlike print, which consists of mostly arbitrary symbols,
1725-530: Is dot 5, which combines with the first letter of words. With the letter ⠍ m , the resulting word is ⠐ ⠍ mother . There are also ligatures ("contracted" letters), which are single letters in braille but correspond to more than one letter in print. The letter ⠯ and , for example, is used to write words with the sequence a-n-d in them, such as ⠛ ⠗ ⠯ grand . Most braille embossers support between 34 and 40 cells per line, and 25 lines per page. A manually operated Perkins braille typewriter supports
1800-399: Is extended by adding the decade dots, whereas in the fifth decade it is extended by shifting it downward. Originally there had been nine decades. The fifth through ninth used dashes as well as dots, but they proved to be impractical to distinguish by touch under normal conditions and were soon abandoned. From the beginning, these additional decades could be substituted with what we now know as
1875-471: Is necessary before the stimulus can be disambiguated, and the correct pronunciation can be chosen. In contrast, in a language (such as Chinese) where many characters with the same reading exists, it is hypothesized that the person reading the character will be more familiar with homophones, and that this familiarity will aid the processing of the character, and the subsequent selection of the correct pronunciation, leading to shorter reaction times when attending to
1950-562: Is read as capital 'A', and ⠼ ⠁ as the digit '1'. Basic punctuation marks in English Braille include: ⠦ is both the question mark and the opening quotation mark. Its reading depends on whether it occurs before a word or after. ⠶ is used for both opening and closing parentheses. Its placement relative to spaces and other characters determines its interpretation. Punctuation varies from language to language. For example, French Braille uses ⠢ for its question mark and swaps
2025-427: Is used to emphasize the partially phonetic nature of these scripts when the phonetic domain is the syllable. In Ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs , Ch'olti', and in Chinese, there has been the additional development of determinatives , which are combined with logograms to narrow down their possible meaning. In Chinese, they are fused with logographic elements used phonetically; such " radical and phonetic" characters make up
2100-542: The Arab conquest of Persia and the adoption of a variant of the Arabic alphabet . All historical logographic systems include a phonetic dimension, as it is impractical to have a separate basic character for every word or morpheme in a language. In some cases, such as cuneiform as it was used for Akkadian, the vast majority of glyphs are used for their sound values rather than logographically. Many logographic systems also have
2175-540: The Basic Multilingual Plane encoded in UTF-8 requires up to three bytes. On the other hand, English words, for example, average five characters and a space per word and thus need six bytes for every word. Since many logograms contain more than one grapheme, it is not clear which is more memory-efficient. Variable-width encodings allow a unified character encoding standard such as Unicode to use only
2250-453: The slate and stylus is a portable writing tool, much like the pen and paper for the sighted. Errors can be erased using a braille eraser or can be overwritten with all six dots ( ⠿ ). Interpoint refers to braille printing that is offset, so that the paper can be embossed on both sides, with the dots on one side appearing between the divots that form the dots on the other. Using a computer or other electronic device, Braille may be produced with
2325-421: The French order of the decade was u v x y z ç é à è ù ( ⠥ ⠧ ⠭ ⠽ ⠵ ⠯ ⠿ ⠷ ⠮ ⠾ ). The next ten letters, ending in w , are the same again, except that for this series position 6 (purple dot in the bottom right corner of the cell in the table above) is used without a dot at position 3. In French braille these are the letters â ê î ô û ë ï ü œ w ( ⠡ ⠣ ⠩ ⠹ ⠱ ⠫ ⠻ ⠳ ⠪ ⠺ ). W had been tacked onto
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2400-490: The Old Chinese difference between type-A and type-B syllables (often described as presence vs. absence of palatalization or pharyngealization ); and sometimes, voicing of initial obstruents and/or the presence of a medial /r/ after the initial consonant. In earlier times, greater phonetic freedom was generally allowed. During Middle Chinese times, newly created characters tended to match pronunciation exactly, other than
2475-470: The addition of a dot at position 3 (red dots in the bottom left corners of the cells in the table below): ⠅ ⠇ ⠍ ⠝ ⠕ ⠏ ⠟ ⠗ ⠎ ⠞ : The next ten letters (the next " decade ") are the same again, but with dots also at both position 3 and position 6 (green dots in the bottom rows of the cells in the table above). Here w was left out as it was not part of the official French alphabet in Braille's time;
2550-494: The adoption of Chinese characters by the Japanese and Korean languages (where they are known as kanji and hanja , respectively) have resulted in some complications to this picture. Many Chinese words, composed of Chinese morphemes, were borrowed into Japanese and Korean together with their character representations; in this case, the morphemes and characters were borrowed together. In other cases, however, characters were borrowed to represent native Japanese and Korean morphemes, on
2625-401: The alphabet – thus the code was unable to render the orthography of the words. Second, the 12-dot symbols could not easily fit beneath the pad of the reading finger. This required the reading finger to move in order to perceive the whole symbol, which slowed the reading process. (This was because Barbier's system was based only on the number of dots in each of two 6-dot columns, not
2700-436: The basis of meaning alone. As a result, a single character can end up representing multiple morphemes of similar meaning but with different origins across several languages. Because of this, kanji and hanja are sometimes described as morphographic writing systems. Because much research on language processing has centered on English and other alphabetically written languages, many theories of language processing have stressed
2775-460: The braille alphabet follows a logical sequence. The first ten letters of the alphabet, a – j , use the upper four dot positions: ⠁ ⠃ ⠉ ⠙ ⠑ ⠋ ⠛ ⠓ ⠊ ⠚ (black dots in the table below). These stand for the ten digits 1 – 9 and 0 in an alphabetic numeral system similar to Greek numerals (as well as derivations of it, including Hebrew numerals , Cyrillic numerals , Abjad numerals , also Hebrew gematria and Greek isopsephy ). Though
2850-553: The braille letters according to the sort order of the print alphabet being transcribed; and reassigning the letters to improve the efficiency of writing in braille. Under international consensus, most braille alphabets follow the French sorting order for the 26 letters of the basic Latin alphabet , and there have been attempts at unifying the letters beyond these 26 (see international braille ), though differences remain, for example, in German Braille . This unification avoids
2925-423: The bulk of the script. Ancient Egyptian and Chinese relegated the active use of rebus to the spelling of foreign and dialectical words. Logoconsonantal scripts have graphemes that may be extended phonetically according to the consonants of the words they represent, ignoring the vowels. For example, Egyptian was used to write both sȝ 'duck' and sȝ 'son', though it is likely that these words were not pronounced
3000-552: The chaos of each nation reordering the braille code to match the sorting order of its print alphabet, as happened in Algerian Braille , where braille codes were numerically reassigned to match the order of the Arabic alphabet and bear little relation to the values used in other countries (compare modern Arabic Braille , which uses the French sorting order), and as happened in an early American version of English Braille, where
3075-400: The character was created independently of other characters. "Single-body" pictograms and ideograms make up only a small proportion of Chinese logograms. More productive for the Chinese script were the two "compound" methods, i.e. the character was created from assembling different characters. Despite being called "compounds", these logograms are still single characters, and are written to take up
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3150-403: The correct pronunciation. This hypothesis is confirmed by studies finding that Japanese Alzheimer's disease patients whose comprehension of characters had deteriorated still could read the words out loud with no particular difficulty. Studies contrasting the processing of English and Chinese homophones in lexical decision tasks have found an advantage for homophone processing in Chinese, and
3225-444: The difference in latency in reading aloud Japanese and Chinese due to context effects cannot be ascribed to the logographic nature of the writing systems. Instead, the authors hypothesize that the difference in latency times is due to additional processing costs in Japanese, where the reader cannot rely solely on a direct orthography-to-phonology route, but information on a lexical-syntactical level must also be accessed in order to choose
3300-399: The dots are assigned in no obvious order, the cells with the fewest dots are assigned to the first three letters (and lowest digits), abc = 123 ( ⠁ ⠃ ⠉ ), and to the three vowels in this part of the alphabet, aei ( ⠁ ⠑ ⠊ ), whereas the even digits 4 , 6 , 8 , 0 ( ⠙ ⠋ ⠓ ⠚ ) are right angles. The next ten letters, k – t , are identical to a – j respectively, apart from
3375-403: The earliest writing systems; the first historical civilizations of Mesopotamia, Egypt, China and Mesoamerica used some form of logographic writing. All logographic scripts ever used for natural languages rely on the rebus principle to extend a relatively limited set of logograms: A subset of characters is used for their phonetic values, either consonantal or syllabic. The term logosyllabary
3450-469: The end of 39 letters of the French alphabet to accommodate English. The a – j series shifted down by one dot space ( ⠂ ⠆ ⠒ ⠲ ⠢ ⠖ ⠶ ⠦ ⠔ ⠴ ) is used for punctuation. Letters a ⠁ and c ⠉ , which only use dots in the top row, were shifted two places for the apostrophe and hyphen: ⠄ ⠤ . (These are also the decade diacritics, on the left in the table below, of the second and third decade.) In addition, there are ten patterns that are based on
3525-755: The first braille translator written in a portable programming language. DOTSYS III was developed for the Atlanta Public Schools as a public domain program. Tactile alphabet A tactile alphabet is a system for writing material that the blind can read by touch. While currently the Braille system is the most popular and some materials have been prepared in Moon type , historically, many other tactile alphabets have existed: See also Vibratese . http://abstracts.iovs.org/cgi/content/abstract/46/5/4590 Logogram Logographic systems include
3600-787: The first five phases of the Bamum script . A peculiar system of logograms developed within the Pahlavi scripts (developed from the abjad of Aramaic ) used to write Middle Persian during much of the Sassanid period ; the logograms were composed of letters that spelled out the word in Aramaic but were pronounced as in Persian (for instance, the combination m-l-k would be pronounced "shah"). These logograms, called hozwārishn (a form of heterograms ), were dispensed with altogether after
3675-412: The first two letters ( ⠁ ⠃ ) with their dots shifted to the right; these were assigned to non-French letters ( ì ä ò ⠌ ⠜ ⠬ ), or serve non-letter functions: ⠈ (superscript; in English the accent mark), ⠘ (currency prefix), ⠨ (capital, in English the decimal point ), ⠼ ( number sign ), ⠸ (emphasis mark), ⠐ (symbol prefix). The first four decades are similar in that the numeric sequence
3750-507: The left column and at the top of the right column: that is, the letter ⠍ m . The lines of horizontal braille text are separated by a space, much like visible printed text, so that the dots of one line can be differentiated from the braille text above and below. Different assignments of braille codes (or code pages ) are used to map the character sets of different printed scripts to the six-bit cells. Braille assignments have also been created for mathematical and musical notation. However, because
3825-443: The letters w , x , y , z were reassigned to match English alphabetical order. A convention sometimes seen for letters beyond the basic 26 is to exploit the physical symmetry of braille patterns iconically, for example, by assigning a reversed n to ñ or an inverted s to sh . (See Hungarian Braille and Bharati Braille , which do this to some extent.) A third principle was to assign braille codes according to frequency, with
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#17328023073843900-518: The lower-right dot). Eight-dot braille has the advantages that the casing of each letter is coded in the cell and that every printable ASCII character can be encoded in a single cell. All 256 (2) possible combinations of 8 dots are encoded by the Unicode standard. Braille with six dots is frequently stored as Braille ASCII . The first 25 braille letters, up through the first half of the 3rd decade, transcribe a–z (skipping w ). In English Braille,
3975-407: The need for braille, technological advancements such as braille displays have continued to make braille more accessible and available. Braille users highlight that braille remains as essential as print is to the sighted. ⠏ ⠗ ⠑ ⠍ ⠊ ⠑ ⠗ Braille was based on a tactile code , now known as night writing , developed by Charles Barbier . (The name "night writing" was later given to it when it
4050-481: The number sign ( ⠼ ) applied to the earlier decades, though that only caught on for the digits (the old 5th decade being replaced by ⠼ applied to the 1st decade). The dash occupying the top row of the original sixth decade was simply omitted, producing the modern fifth decade. (See 1829 braille .) Historically, there have been three principles in assigning the values of a linear script (print) to Braille: Using Louis Braille's original French letter values; reassigning
4125-399: The on-screen braille input keyboard, to type braille symbols on to their device by placing their fingers on to the screen according to the dot configuration of the symbols they wish to form. These symbols are automatically translated into print on the screen. The different tools that exist for writing braille allow the braille user to select the method that is best for a given task. For example,
4200-444: The pattern of the dots.) Third, the code did not include symbols for numerals or punctuation. Braille's solution was to use 6-dot cells and to assign a specific pattern to each letter of the alphabet. Braille also developed symbols for representing numerals and punctuation. At first, braille was a one-to-one transliteration of the French alphabet, but soon various abbreviations (contractions) and even logograms were developed, creating
4275-467: The practical compromise of standardizing how words are written while maintaining a nearly one-to-one relation between characters and sounds. Orthographies in some other languages, such as English , French , Thai and Tibetan , are all more complicated than that; character combinations are often pronounced in multiple ways, usually depending on their history. Hangul , the Korean language 's writing system,
4350-471: The pronunciation. Though not from an inherent feature of logograms but due to its unique history of development, Japanese has the added complication that almost every logogram has more than one pronunciation. Conversely, a phonetic character set is written precisely as it is spoken, but with the disadvantage that slight pronunciation differences introduce ambiguities. Many alphabetic systems such as those of Greek , Latin , Italian , Spanish , and Finnish make
4425-536: The quotation marks and parentheses (to ⠶ and ⠦ ⠴ ); it uses ( ⠲ ) for both the period and the decimal point, and the English decimal point ( ⠨ ) to mark capitalization. Braille contractions are words and affixes that are shortened so that they take up fewer cells. In English Braille, for example, the word afternoon is written with just three letters, ⠁ ⠋ ⠝ ⟨afn⟩ , much like stenoscript . There are also several abbreviation marks that create what are effectively logograms . The most common of these
4500-417: The rest of that decade is rounded out with the ligatures and, for, of, the, and with . Omitting dot 3 from these forms the 4th decade, the ligatures ch, gh, sh, th, wh, ed, er, ou, ow and the letter w . (See English Braille .) Various formatting marks affect the values of the letters that follow them. They have no direct equivalent in print. The most important in English Braille are: That is, ⠠ ⠁
4575-535: The role of hemispheric lateralization in orthographically versus phonetically coded languages. Another topic that has been given some attention is differences in processing of homophones. Verdonschot et al. examined differences in the time it took to read a homophone out loud when a picture that was either related or unrelated to a homophonic character was presented before the character. Both Japanese and Chinese homophones were examined. Whereas word production of alphabetically coded languages (such as English) has shown
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#17328023073844650-903: The role of phonology in producing speech. Contrasting logographically coded languages, where a single character is represented phonetically and ideographically, with phonetically/phonemically spelled languages has yielded insights into how different languages rely on different processing mechanisms. Studies on the processing of logographically coded languages have amongst other things looked at neurobiological differences in processing, with one area of particular interest being hemispheric lateralization. Since logographically coded languages are more closely associated with images than alphabetically coded languages, several researchers have hypothesized that right-side activation should be more prominent in logographically coded languages. Although some studies have yielded results consistent with this hypothesis there are too many contrasting results to make any final conclusions about
4725-708: The same amount of space as any other logogram. The final two types are methods in the usage of characters rather than the formation of characters themselves. The most productive method of Chinese writing, the radical-phonetic, was made possible by ignoring certain distinctions in the phonetic system of syllables. In Old Chinese , post-final ending consonants /s/ and /ʔ/ were typically ignored; these developed into tones in Middle Chinese , which were likewise ignored when new characters were created. Also ignored were differences in aspiration (between aspirated vs. unaspirated obstruents , and voiced vs. unvoiced sonorants);
4800-488: The same except for their consonants. The primary examples of logoconsonantal scripts are Egyptian hieroglyphs , hieratic , and demotic : Ancient Egyptian . Logosyllabic scripts have graphemes which represent morphemes, often polysyllabic morphemes, but when extended phonetically represent single syllables. They include cuneiform, Anatolian hieroglyphs , Cretan hieroglyphs , Linear A and Linear B , Chinese characters , Maya script , Aztec script , Mixtec script , and
4875-604: The scripts, or if it merely reflects an advantage for languages with more homophones regardless of script nature, remains to be seen. The main difference between logograms and other writing systems is that the graphemes are not linked directly to their pronunciation. An advantage of this separation is that understanding of the pronunciation or language of the writer is unnecessary, e.g. 1 is understood regardless of whether it be called one , ichi or wāḥid by its reader. Likewise, people speaking different varieties of Chinese may not understand each other in speaking, but may do so to
4950-554: The simplest patterns (quickest ones to write with a stylus) assigned to the most frequent letters of the alphabet. Such frequency-based alphabets were used in Germany and the United States in the 19th century (see American Braille ), but with the invention of the braille typewriter their advantage disappeared, and none are attested in modern use – they had the disadvantage that the resulting small number of dots in
5025-413: The six positions, producing 64 (2) possible patterns, including one in which there are no raised dots. For reference purposes, a pattern is commonly described by listing the positions where dots are raised, the positions being universally numbered, from top to bottom, as 1 to 3 on the left and 4 to 6 on the right. For example, dot pattern 1-3-4 describes a cell with three dots raised, at the top and bottom in
5100-414: The six-dot braille cell allows only 64 (2) patterns, including space, the characters of a braille script commonly have multiple values, depending on their context. That is, character mapping between print and braille is not one-to-one. For example, the character ⠙ corresponds in print to both the letter d and the digit 4 . In addition to simple encoding, many braille alphabets use contractions to reduce
5175-404: The size of braille texts and to increase reading speed. (See Contracted braille .) Braille may be produced by hand using a slate and stylus in which each dot is created from the back of the page, writing in mirror image, or it may be produced on a braille typewriter or Perkins Brailler , or an electronic Brailler or braille notetaker. Braille users with access to smartphones may also activate
5250-424: The stimulus. In an attempt to better understand homophony effects on processing, Hino et al. conducted a series of experiments using Japanese as their target language. While controlling for familiarity, they found a processing advantage for homophones over non-homophones in Japanese, similar to what has previously been found in Chinese. The researchers also tested whether orthographically similar homophones would yield
5325-787: The tone – often by using as the phonetic component a character that itself is a radical-phonetic compound. Due to the long period of language evolution, such component "hints" within characters as provided by the radical-phonetic compounds are sometimes useless and may be misleading in modern usage. As an example, based on 每 'each', pronounced měi in Standard Mandarin , are the characters 侮 'to humiliate', 悔 'to regret', and 海 'sea', pronounced respectively wǔ , huǐ , and hǎi in Mandarin. Three of these characters were pronounced very similarly in Old Chinese – /mˤəʔ/ (每), /m̥ˤəʔ/ (悔), and /m̥ˤəʔ/ (海) according to
5400-484: The use of a computer connected to a braille embosser . Braille is named after its creator, Louis Braille , a Frenchman who lost his sight as a result of a childhood accident. In 1824, at the age of fifteen, he developed the braille code based on the French alphabet as an improvement on night writing . He published his system, which subsequently included musical notation , in 1829. The second revision, published in 1837,
5475-453: Was considered as a means for soldiers to communicate silently at night and without a light source, but Barbier's writings do not use this term and suggest that it was originally designed as a simpler form of writing and for the visually impaired.) In Barbier's system, sets of 12 embossed dots were used to encode 36 different sounds. Braille identified three major defects of the code: first, the symbols represented phonetic sounds and not letters of
5550-764: Was introduced around 1933. In 1951 David Abraham, a woodworking teacher at the Perkins School for the Blind , produced a more advanced Braille typewriter, the Perkins Brailler . Braille printers or embossers were produced in the 1950s. In 1960 Robert Mann, a teacher in MIT, wrote DOTSYS , a software that allowed automatic braille translation , and another group created an embossing device called "M.I.T. Braillemboss". The Mitre Corporation team of Robert Gildea, Jonathan Millen, Reid Gerhart and Joseph Sullivan (now president of Duxbury Systems) developed DOTSYS III,
5625-749: Was the first binary form of writing developed in the modern era. Braille characters are formed using a combination of six raised dots arranged in a 3 × 2 matrix, called the braille cell. The number and arrangement of these dots distinguishes one character from another. Since the various braille alphabets originated as transcription codes for printed writing, the mappings (sets of character designations) vary from language to language, and even within one; in English braille there are three levels: uncontracted – a letter-by-letter transcription used for basic literacy; contracted – an addition of abbreviations and contractions used as
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