1.
Braille
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Braille /ˈbreɪl/ is a tactile writing system used by people who are blind or visually impaired. It is traditionally written with embossed paper, braille-users can read computer screens and other electronic supports thanks to refreshable braille displays. They can write braille with the slate and stylus or type it on a braille writer, such as a portable braille note-taker. Braille is named after its creator, Frenchman Louis Braille, who lost his eyesight due to a childhood accident, in 1824, at the age of 15, Braille developed his code for the French alphabet as an improvement on night writing. He published his system, which included musical notation, in 1829. The second revision, published in 1837, was the first binary form of writing developed in the modern era, Braille characters are small rectangular blocks called cells that contain tiny palpable bumps called raised dots. The number and arrangement of these dots distinguish one character from another, since the various braille alphabets originated as transcription codes of printed writing systems, the mappings vary from language to language. Braille cells are not the thing to appear in braille text. There may be embossed illustrations and graphs, with the lines either solid or made of series of dots, arrows, bullets that are larger than braille dots, a full Braille cell includes six raised dots arranged in two lateral rows each having three dots. The dot positions are identified by numbers from one through six,64 solutions are possible from using one or more dots. A single cell can be used to represent a letter, number, punctuation mark. In the face of screen-reader software, braille usage has declined, in Barbiers system, sets of 12 embossed dots encoded 36 different sounds. It proved to be too difficult for soldiers to recognize by touch, in 1821 Barbier visited the Royal Institute for the Blind in Paris, where he met Louis Braille. Brailles solution was to use 6-dot cells and to assign a specific pattern to each letter of the alphabet. At first, braille was a transliteration of French orthography, but soon various abbreviations, contractions. The expanded English system, called Grade-2 Braille, was complete by 1905, for blind readers, Braille is an independent writing system, rather than a code of printed orthography. Braille is derived from the Latin alphabet, albeit indirectly, in Brailles original system, the dot patterns were assigned to letters according to their position within the alphabetic order of the French alphabet, with accented letters and w sorted at the end. The first ten letters of the alphabet, a–j, use the upper four dot positions and these stand for the ten digits 1–9 and 0 in a system parallel to Hebrew gematria and Greek isopsephy
2.
China
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China, officially the Peoples Republic of China, is a unitary sovereign state in East Asia and the worlds most populous country, with a population of over 1.381 billion. The state is governed by the Communist Party of China and its capital is Beijing, the countrys major urban areas include Shanghai, Guangzhou, Beijing, Chongqing, Shenzhen, Tianjin and Hong Kong. China is a power and a major regional power within Asia. Chinas landscape is vast and diverse, ranging from forest steppes, the Himalaya, Karakoram, Pamir and Tian Shan mountain ranges separate China from much of South and Central Asia. The Yangtze and Yellow Rivers, the third and sixth longest in the world, respectively, Chinas coastline along the Pacific Ocean is 14,500 kilometers long and is bounded by the Bohai, Yellow, East China and South China seas. China emerged as one of the worlds earliest civilizations in the basin of the Yellow River in the North China Plain. For millennia, Chinas political system was based on hereditary monarchies known as dynasties, in 1912, the Republic of China replaced the last dynasty and ruled the Chinese mainland until 1949, when it was defeated by the communist Peoples Liberation Army in the Chinese Civil War. The Communist Party established the Peoples Republic of China in Beijing on 1 October 1949, both the ROC and PRC continue to claim to be the legitimate government of all China, though the latter has more recognition in the world and controls more territory. China had the largest economy in the world for much of the last two years, during which it has seen cycles of prosperity and decline. Since the introduction of reforms in 1978, China has become one of the worlds fastest-growing major economies. As of 2016, it is the worlds second-largest economy by nominal GDP, China is also the worlds largest exporter and second-largest importer of goods. China is a nuclear weapons state and has the worlds largest standing army. The PRC is a member of the United Nations, as it replaced the ROC as a permanent member of the U. N. Security Council in 1971. China is also a member of numerous formal and informal multilateral organizations, including the WTO, APEC, BRICS, the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, the BCIM, the English name China is first attested in Richard Edens 1555 translation of the 1516 journal of the Portuguese explorer Duarte Barbosa. The demonym, that is, the name for the people, Portuguese China is thought to derive from Persian Chīn, and perhaps ultimately from Sanskrit Cīna. Cīna was first used in early Hindu scripture, including the Mahābhārata, there are, however, other suggestions for the derivation of China. The official name of the state is the Peoples Republic of China. The shorter form is China Zhōngguó, from zhōng and guó and it was then applied to the area around Luoyi during the Eastern Zhou and then to Chinas Central Plain before being used as an occasional synonym for the state under the Qing
3.
Pinyin
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Pinyin, or Hànyǔ Pīnyīn, is the official romanization system for Standard Chinese in mainland China, Malaysia, Singapore, and Taiwan. It is often used to teach Standard Chinese, which is written using Chinese characters. The system includes four diacritics denoting tones, Pinyin without tone marks is used to spell Chinese names and words in languages written with the Latin alphabet, and also in certain computer input methods to enter Chinese characters. The pinyin system was developed in the 1950s by many linguists, including Zhou Youguang and it was published by the Chinese government in 1958 and revised several times. The International Organization for Standardization adopted pinyin as a standard in 1982. The system was adopted as the standard in Taiwan in 2009. The word Hànyǔ means the language of the Han people. In 1605, the Jesuit missionary Matteo Ricci published Xizi Qiji in Beijing and this was the first book to use the Roman alphabet to write the Chinese language. Twenty years later, another Jesuit in China, Nicolas Trigault, neither book had much immediate impact on the way in which Chinese thought about their writing system, and the romanizations they described were intended more for Westerners than for the Chinese. One of the earliest Chinese thinkers to relate Western alphabets to Chinese was late Ming to early Qing Dynasty scholar-official, the first late Qing reformer to propose that China adopt a system of spelling was Song Shu. A student of the great scholars Yu Yue and Zhang Taiyan, Song had been to Japan and observed the effect of the kana syllabaries. This galvanized him into activity on a number of fronts, one of the most important being reform of the script, while Song did not himself actually create a system for spelling Sinitic languages, his discussion proved fertile and led to a proliferation of schemes for phonetic scripts. The Wade–Giles system was produced by Thomas Wade in 1859, and it was popular and used in English-language publications outside China until 1979. This Sin Wenz or New Writing was much more sophisticated than earlier alphabets. In 1940, several members attended a Border Region Sin Wenz Society convention. Mao Zedong and Zhu De, head of the army, both contributed their calligraphy for the masthead of the Sin Wenz Societys new journal. Outside the CCP, other prominent supporters included Sun Yat-sens son, Sun Fo, Cai Yuanpei, the countrys most prestigious educator, Tao Xingzhi, an educational reformer. Over thirty journals soon appeared written in Sin Wenz, plus large numbers of translations, biographies, some contemporary Chinese literature, and a spectrum of textbooks
4.
Bopomofo
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Zhuyin fuhao, Zhuyin or Bopomofo is a system of phonetic notation for the transcription of spoken Chinese, particularly the Mandarin dialect. The first two are traditional terms, whereas Bopomofo is the term, also used by the ISO. Consisting of 37 characters and four marks, it transcribes all possible sounds in Mandarin. Zhuyin was introduced in China by the Republican Government in the 1910s and used alongside the Wade-Giles system, the Wade system was replaced by Hanyu Pinyin in 1958 by the Government of the Peoples Republic of China, and at the International Organization for Standardization in 1982. The informal name Bopomofo is derived from the first four syllables in the ordering of available syllables in Mandarin Chinese. The four Bopomofo characters that correspond to these syllables are placed first in a list of these characters. The same sequence is used by other speakers of Chinese to refer to other phonetic systems. The original formal name of the system was Guóyīn Zìmǔ and Zhùyīn Zìmǔ and it was later renamed Zhùyīn Fúhào, meaning phonetic symbols. In official documents, Zhuyin is occasionally called Mandarin Phonetic Symbols I, in English translations, the system is often also called either Chu-yin or the Mandarin Phonetic Symbols. A romanized phonetic system was released in 1984 as Mandarin Phonetic Symbols II, the Commission on the Unification of Pronunciation, led by Wu Zhihui from 1912 to 1913, created a system called Zhuyin Zimu, which was based on Zhang Binglins shorthand. A draft was released on July 11,1913, by the Republic of China National Ministry of Education and it was later renamed first Guoyin Zimu and then, in April 1930, Zhuyin Fuhao. The last renaming addressed fears that the system might independently replace Chinese characters. Zhuyin remains the predominant phonetic system in teaching reading and writing in school in Taiwan. It is also one of the most popular ways to enter Chinese characters into computers and smartphones, in elementary school, particularly in the lower years, Chinese characters in textbooks are often annotated with Zhuyin as ruby characters as an aid to learning. Additionally, one newspaper in Taiwan, the Mandarin Daily News. In teaching Mandarin, Taiwan institutions and some communities use Zhuyin as a learning tool. The Zhuyin characters were created by Zhang Binglin, and taken mainly from regularised forms of ancient Chinese characters, the modern readings of which contain the sound that each letter represents. It is to be noted that the first consonants are articulated from the front of the mouth to the back, /b/, /p/, /m/, /f/, /d/, /t/, /n/, Zhuyin is written in the same stroke order rule as Chinese characters
5.
French Braille
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French Braille is the original braille alphabet, and the basis of all others. The alphabetic order of French has become the basis of the international braille convention, punctuation is as follows, The lower values are readings within numbers. Formatting and mode-changing marks are, As in English Braille, the sign is doubled for all caps. ⟨⠢⟩ and ⟨⠔⟩ are used to begin. This is the internationally recognized number system, however, in French Braille a new system, the Antoine braille digits, is used for mathematics and is recommended for all academic publications. This uses ⠠ combined with the first nine letters of the decade, from ⠠⠡ for ⟨1⟩ to ⠠⠪ for ⟨9⟩. The period/decimal and fraction bar also change, the Antoine numbers are being promoted in France and Luxembourg, but are not much used in with French Braille in Quebec. See the punctuation section above for Antoine mathematical notation, readings have changed slightly since modern braille was first published in 1837. The greatest change has been various secondary readings which were added to the alphabet, in general, only the assignments of the basic 26 letters of the French alphabet are retained in other braille alphabets. For example, among the additional letters, in German Braille only ü and ö coincide with French Braille, however, there are several alphabets which are much more closely related. Flemish Dutch uses the French Braille alphabet, in contrast to the German-derived Netherlands Dutch Braille, Italian Braille is identical to the French apart from doubling up French Braille ò to Italian ó and ò, since French has no ó. Indeed, a difference of these alphabets is the remapping of French vowels with a grave accent to an acute accent. Spanish changes all five of these vowels, as well as taking ü, the continental Scandinavian languages took the extended French letters â, ä/æ, and ö/ø. Vietnamese Braille is also similar, though it has added tone letters, and according uses French ⠵ z for d. Catalan Braille adds ⠇⠐⠇ for print ⟨l·l⟩, and Spanish Braille uses ⠻ for the non-French consonant ñ, luxembourgish Braille has since switch to eight-point braille, adding a dot at point 8 for the three vowels with accents. Punctuation and formatting are in general similar as well, though changes in French punctuation over time means that languages use older French conventions. For example, French parentheses and quotation marks originally had the values they do today. Other changes have accrued over time, and in some cases vary from country to country
6.
Simplified Chinese characters
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Simplified Chinese characters are standardized Chinese characters prescribed in the Table of General Standard Chinese Characters for use in mainland China. Along with traditional Chinese characters, it is one of the two character sets of the contemporary Chinese written language. The government of the Peoples Republic of China in mainland China has promoted them for use in printing since the 1950s and 1960s in an attempt to increase literacy and they are officially used in the Peoples Republic of China and Singapore. Traditional Chinese characters are used in Hong Kong, Macau. Overseas Chinese communities generally tend to use traditional characters, Simplified Chinese characters may be referred to by their official name above or colloquially. Strictly, the latter refers to simplifications of character structure or body, character forms that have existed for thousands of years alongside regular, Simplified character forms were created by decreasing the number of strokes and simplifying the forms of a sizable proportion of traditional Chinese characters. Some simplifications were based on popular cursive forms embodying graphic or phonetic simplifications of the traditional forms, some characters were simplified by applying regular rules, for example, by replacing all occurrences of a certain component with a simplified version of the component. Variant characters with the pronunciation and identical meaning were reduced to a single standardized character. Finally, many characters were left untouched by simplification, and are identical between the traditional and simplified Chinese orthographies. Some simplified characters are very dissimilar to and unpredictably different from traditional characters and this often leads opponents not well-versed in the method of simplification to conclude that the overall process of character simplification is also arbitrary. In reality, the methods and rules of simplification are few, on the other hand, proponents of simplification often flaunt a few choice simplified characters as ingenious inventions, when in fact these have existed for hundreds of years as ancient variants. However, the Chinese government never officially dropped its goal of further simplification in the future, in August 2009, the PRC began collecting public comments for a modified list of simplified characters. The new Table of General Standard Chinese Characters consisting of 8,105 characters was promulgated by the State Council of the Peoples Republic of China on June 5,2013, cursive written text almost always includes character simplification. Simplified forms used in print have always existed, they date back to as early as the Qin dynasty, One of the earliest proponents of character simplification was Lubi Kui, who proposed in 1909 that simplified characters should be used in education. In the years following the May Fourth Movement in 1919, many anti-imperialist Chinese intellectuals sought ways to modernise China, Traditional culture and values such as Confucianism were challenged. Soon, people in the Movement started to cite the traditional Chinese writing system as an obstacle in modernising China and it was suggested that the Chinese writing system should be either simplified or completely abolished. Fu Sinian, a leader of the May Fourth Movement, called Chinese characters the writing of ox-demons, lu Xun, a renowned Chinese author in the 20th century, stated that, If Chinese characters are not destroyed, then China will die. Recent commentators have claimed that Chinese characters were blamed for the problems in China during that time
7.
Russian Braille
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Russian Braille is the braille alphabet of the Russian language. With suitable extensions, it is used for languages of neighboring countries that are written in Cyrillic in print and it is based on the Latin transliteration of Cyrillic, with additional letters assigned idiosyncratically. In Russian, it is known as Шрифт Брайля Shrift Braylya Braille Script, the Russian Braille alphabet is as follows, The adaptation of ⠟ q to ч and ⠭ x to щ is reminiscent of the adaptation in Chinese pinyin of q to and x to. The pre-Revolutionary alphabet, reproduced at right from an old encyclopedia, in addition, the letter э is shown with a slightly different form. Although obsolete in Russian Braille, these continue in several derivative alphabets. Single punctuation, Paired punctuation, Columns marked with ⠿ are shown in the image in the box. Numbers are the letters a–j introduced with ⠼, as in other alphabets and their braille alphabets are similarly derived from Russian Braille. The braille assignments for the found in Russian print are the same as in Russian Braille. Generally not all of the Russian letters are used, except perhaps in Russian loans, punctuation and formatting, as far as they are attested, agree with Russian Braille, though Kazakh Braille is reported to use the Russian arithmetical parentheses ⠣⠀⠜. Ukrainian has the additional letters і, ї, є, ґ, the є is the mirror image of old Russian э, while і is the old Russian і, and ї is old Russian ѣ. Unesco was unable to verify these values, Belarusian has the additional letters і and ў. They are the images of й and у. Unesco was unable to verify these values, Kazakh has the additional letters ә, ғ, қ, ң, һ, ө, ү, ұ, і. See Kazakh alphabets#Correspondence chart for the braille alphabet aligned with the Cyrillic. Mongolian has ө, ү, but with different braille assignments again, see Mongolian Cyrillic alphabet for the whole alphabet aligned with Cyrillic. Unesco reported additional braille adaptations of Cyrillic in 1990, for Tajik, Turkmen, and Uzbek, the additional letters in the report are shown here, but like those of Ukrainian and Belarusian, they are unverified and should be treated with caution. Tajik ⠻ ғ, ⠌ ӣ, ⠽ қ, ⠬ ӯ, ⠹ ҳ, ⠧ ҷ Turkmen ⠣ ә, ⠹ җ, ⠜ ң, ⠧ ө, ⠽ ү Uzbek ⠻ ғ, қ, ⠧ ў, ⠹ ҳ
8.
Standard Chinese
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Its pronunciation is based on the Beijing dialect, its vocabulary on the Mandarin dialects, and its grammar is based on written vernacular Chinese. Like other varieties of Chinese, Standard Chinese is a language with topic-prominent organization. It has more initial consonants but fewer vowels, final consonants, Standard Chinese is an analytic language, though with many compound words. There exist two standardised forms of the language, namely Putonghua in Mainland China and Guoyu in Taiwan, aside from a number of differences in pronunciation and vocabulary, Putonghua is written using simplified Chinese characters, while Guoyu is written using traditional Chinese characters. There are many characters that are identical between the two systems, in English, the governments of China and Hong Kong use Putonghua, Putonghua Chinese, Mandarin Chinese, and Mandarin, while those of Taiwan, Singapore, and Malaysia, use Mandarin. The name Putonghua also has a long, albeit unofficial, history and it was used as early as 1906 in writings by Zhu Wenxiong to differentiate a modern, standard Chinese from classical Chinese and other varieties of Chinese. For some linguists of the early 20th century, the Putonghua, or common tongue/speech, was different from the Guoyu. The former was a prestige variety, while the latter was the legal standard. Based on common understandings of the time, the two were, in fact, different, Guoyu was understood as formal vernacular Chinese, which is close to classical Chinese. By contrast, Putonghua was called the speech of the modern man. The use of the term Putonghua by left-leaning intellectuals such as Qu Qiubai, prior to this, the government used both terms interchangeably. In Taiwan, Guoyu continues to be the term for Standard Chinese. The term Putonghua, on the contrary, implies nothing more than the notion of a lingua franca, Huayu, or language of the Chinese nation, originally simply meant Chinese language, and was used in overseas communities to contrast Chinese with foreign languages. Over time, the desire to standardise the variety of Chinese spoken in these communities led to the adoption of the name Huayu to refer to Mandarin and it also incorporates the notion that Mandarin is usually not the national or common language of the areas in which overseas Chinese live. The term Mandarin is a translation of Guānhuà, which referred to the lingua franca of the late Chinese empire, in English, Mandarin may refer to the standard language, the dialect group as a whole, or to historic forms such as the late Imperial lingua franca. The name Modern Standard Mandarin is sometimes used by linguists who wish to distinguish the current state of the language from other northern. Chinese has long had considerable variation, hence prestige dialects have always existed. Confucius, for example, used yǎyán rather than colloquial regional dialects, rime books, which were written since the Northern and Southern dynasties, may also have reflected one or more systems of standard pronunciation during those times
9.
Traditional Chinese characters
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Traditional Chinese characters are Chinese characters in any character set that does not contain newly created characters or character substitutions performed after 1946. They are most commonly the characters in the character sets of Taiwan, of Hong Kong. Currently, a number of overseas Chinese online newspapers allow users to switch between both sets. In contrast, simplified Chinese characters are used in mainland China, Singapore, the debate on traditional and simplified Chinese characters has been a long-running issue among Chinese communities. Although simplified characters are taught and endorsed by the government of Mainland China, Traditional characters are used informally in regions in China primarily in handwriting and also used for inscriptions and religious text. They are often retained in logos or graphics to evoke yesteryear, nonetheless, the vast majority of media and communications in China is dominated by simplified characters. Taiwan has never adopted Simplified Chinese characters since it is ruled by the Republic of China, the use of simplified characters in official documents is even prohibited by the government in Taiwan. Simplified characters are not well understood in general, although some stroke simplifications that have incorporated into Simplified Chinese are in common use in handwriting. For example, while the name of Taiwan is written as 臺灣, similarly, in Hong Kong and Macau, Traditional Chinese has been the legal written form since colonial times. In recent years, because of the influx of mainland Chinese tourists, today, even government websites use simplified Chinese, as they answer to the Beijing government. This has led to concerns by residents to protect their local heritage. In Southeast Asia, the Chinese Filipino community continues to be one of the most conservative regarding simplification, while major public universities are teaching simplified characters, many well-established Chinese schools still use traditional characters. Publications like the Chinese Commercial News, World News, and United Daily News still use traditional characters, on the other hand, the Philippine Chinese Daily uses simplified. Aside from local newspapers, magazines from Hong Kong, such as the Yazhou Zhoukan, are found in some bookstores. In case of film or television subtitles on DVD, the Chinese dub that is used in Philippines is the same as the one used in Taiwan and this is because the DVDs belongs to DVD Region Code 3. Hence, most of the subtitles are in Traditional Characters, overseas Chinese in the United States have long used traditional characters. A major influx of Chinese immigrants to the United States occurred during the half of the 19th century. Therefore, the majority of Chinese language signage in the United States, including street signs, Traditional Chinese characters are called several different names within the Chinese-speaking world
10.
Taiwanese Braille
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Taiwanese Braille is the braille script used in Taiwan for Taiwanese Mandarin. Although based marginally on international braille, the majority of consonants have been reassigned, also, like Chinese Braille, Taiwanese Braille is a semi-syllabary. An example is, The braille letters for zhuyin/pinyin ㄍ g, ㄘ c, and ㄙ s double for the alveolo-palatal consonants ㄐ j, ㄑ q, and ㄒ x. The latter are followed by front vowels, namely ㄧ i and ㄩ ü. Each medial + rime in zhuyin is written with a letter in braille. ⠱ is used for both the empty rime -i, which is not written in zhuyin, and the rime ㄦ er. See for example 斯 sī located above the word Daguerre in the image at right and this includes toneless syllables such as 了 le, rendered ⠉⠮⠁lė in the image above-right
11.
Semi-syllabary
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A semi-syllabary is a writing system that behaves partly as an alphabet and partly as a syllabary. The term has traditionally been extended to abugidas, but for the purposes of this article it will be restricted to scripts where some characters are alphabetic and others are syllabic. The Paleohispanic semi-syllabaries are a family of scripts developed in the Iberian Peninsula at least from the 5th century BCE – possibly from the 7th century, some researchers conclude that their origin lies solely with the Phoenician alphabet, while others believe the Greek alphabet also had a role. In the syllabic portions of the scripts, each stop-consonant sign stood for a different combination of consonant and vowel, so that the written form of ga displayed no resemblance to ge. The Tartessian or Southwestern script had a special behaviour, although the letter used to write a stop consonant was determined by the following vowel, some scholars treat Tartessian as a redundant semi-syllabary, others treat it as a redundant alphabet. One of these is zhuyin, a script devised for transcribing certain varieties of Chinese. Zhuyin includes several systems, such as Mandarin Phonetic Symbols for Mandarin Chinese, Taiwanese Phonetic Symbols for Taiwanese Hokkien and Hakka, zhuyin is not divided into consonants and vowels, but into onsets and rimes. Initial consonants and medials are alphabetic, but the nucleus and coda are combined as in syllabaries and that is, a syllable like kan is written k-an, and kwan is written k-u-an, the vowel is not written distinct from a final consonant. The modern Bamum script is essentially CV-syllabic, but doesnt have enough glyphs for all the CV syllables of the language, the rest are written by combining CV and V glyphs, making these effectively alphabetic. Correa, José Antonio, «Del alfabeto fenicio al semisilabario paleohispánico», Palaeohispanica 5, ferrer i Jané, Joan, «Novetats sobre el sistema dual de diferenciació gràfica de les oclusives sordes i sonores», Palaeohispanica 5, pp. 957–982. Rodríguez Ramos, Jesús, «La lectura de las inscripciones sudlusitano-tartesias», Faventia 22/1, Iberian Epigraphy – Jesús Rodríguez Ramos
12.
Night writing
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It was designed in 1808 by Charles Barbier in response to Napoleons demand for a code that soldiers could use to communicate silently and without light at night. Called sonography, each grid of dots stands for a character or phoneme, barbiers system was related to the Polybius square, in which a two-digit code represents a character. g. 4–2 for t represented by As many as twelve dots would be needed to represent one symbol, barbiers system was found to be too difficult for soldiers to learn and was rejected by the military. In 1821, Barbier visited the National Institute for the Blind in Paris, France, Braille identified the major failing of the code, which was that the human finger could not encompass the whole symbol without moving and so could not move rapidly from one symbol to another. His modification was to use a 6-dot cell, the Braille system that revolutionized written communication for the visually impaired
