Luxembourgish Braille

Luxembourgish Braille
Type	alphabet
Languages	Luxembourgish
Parent systems	Braille French Braille Luxembourgish Braille
Print basis	Luxembourgish alphabet

Luxembourgish Braille is the braille alphabet of the Luxembourgish language. It is very close to French Braille, but uses eight-dot cells, with the extra pair of dots at the bottom of each cell to indicate capitalization and accent marks. It is the only eight-dot alphabet listed in Unesco (2013). Children start off with the older six-dot script (Unesco 1990), then switch to eight-dot cells when they start primary school and learn the numbers.^[1]

Alphabet

The Luxembourgish Braille alphabet started off as a reduced set of the letters of the French Braille alphabet, the basic 26 plus three letters for print vowels with diacritics: ⠿ é, ⠫ ë, ⠜ ä. With the shift to eight-point script, these three acquired an extra dot at point 8. The letters are thus:

a	b	c	d	e	f	g	h	i	j
k	l	m	n	o	p	q	r	s	t
u	v	w	x	y	z	ä	ë	é

Dot-7 is added to form capitals:

A	B	C	D	E	F	G	H	I	J
K	L	M	N	O	P	Q	R	S	T
U	V	W	X	Y	Z	Ä	Ë	É

Apart from the accented letters, these are the letter forms of the Gardner–Salinas Braille code used for technical notation. The digits 1–9 (but not 0) are also as in Gardner–Salinas. However, Luxembourgish punctuation is quite different.

Numbers

The Antoine notation being promoted in France is used for numbers. However, because there is no possibility of confusing these digits with the letters of the Luxembourgish alphabet, as there is with the French Braille alphabet, they are written without the French number sign ⟨⠠⟩.^[2] That is, in Luxembourgish Braille, numbers are simply written as they are in print, without requiring any special indication that they are numbers.

0

1

2

3

4

5

6

7

8

9

Punctuation

The exclamation mark is unusual, and brackets are in effect capitalized braces.

,

.

!

'

?

;

:

“ ... ”

( ... )

{ ... }

[ ... ]

Formatting

Formatting is used for emphasis and the like. There are no capitalization or number signs in 8-dot Luxembourgish Braille.

References

1. In six-dot script, the digit 6 has the same form as the letter ⠫ ë that in other braille alphabets is resolved with a digit-indicator.
2. ⟨⠠⟩ has been reassigned to the apostrophe.

• UNESCO (2013) World Braille Usage, 3rd edition.