Michael Campbell, “10-Language Dictionary of Chinese Characters”, 2018, was topic of an earlier blog post.
Here I present: Michael Campbell, “10-Language Dictionary of Chinese Characters”, 2018, PART TWO (2).
INTRODUCTION.
I want to discuss Braille systems for East Asian languages using Chinese characters. First, thousands of characters for writing in Chinese and Japanese are not represented by the sixty-four (64) choices of Braille six (6) dots cell.
ATOP is the Chinese Braille system and BENEATH is the Japanese Braille system. The “Chinese Braille Story“ follows BELOW.
“CHINESE BRAILLE STORY”.
In 1900, a British female missionary named Miss Ganland created a braille system for the Nanjing dialect using the phonetic method of Chinese pinyin. She gave it a beautiful and auspicious name, “Xinmu Keming,” which means that both the heart and the eyes can see. This braille system had 54 letters, including 18 initials and 36 finals. Most of the initials, finals, and tones were arranged in three (3) groups, with finals forming independent syllables in two (2) groups. The Shanghai School for the Blind, founded in 1911, used this braille system, and the school also printed primary school textbooks using it. This contributed to the widespread adoption of this braille system in blind schools across the country.
In the late 1920s, Dr. Wang Xiangyuan, a blind teacher from Shanghai, developed a two-group version of “Xinmu Keming” based on this system and referencing the tonal notation methods of “Kangxi Braille.” This two-group system not only marked the five tones of the Nanjing dialect within two groups of phonetic symbols but also maintained the structural relationship between the initials and finals. It became quite popular among the blind in Shanghai for a time and can be considered the earliest dual-initial and tone-marking Chinese braille system.
