Here I present: Andrew Nelson, “Japanese-English Character Dictionary”, 1997, PART THREE (3).
INTRODUCTION.
Andrew Nelson, “Japanese-English Character Dictionary”, 1997 is a classic book. In this blog post I present some background on attempts to represent Chinese characters used in Japan as Braille eight (8) dot cells. Romaji (romanization) is the term for representation of Japanese in Latin letters (abc’s), and it is well adapted to Japanese Braille.
TENKANJI & KANTENJI.
Tenji, is the system of standard Japanese braille in use since 1890 does not permit the direct brailling of the Japanese Kanji, the Chinese characters that are used in the modern Japanese logographic writing system.
It was generally thought that access to these characters could bring blind people closer to mainstream print used by sighted Japanese people thus facilitating communication and a common understanding about their language. However, with over 10,000 kanji in common use, devising a braille code to represent this form of print was a formidable task.
In the 1950’s, Taiji Kawakami, a sighted teacher at a school for the blind in Osaka, developed kantenji, an eight-dot code to represent kanji. This code used the upper two dots of the cell to indicate that it was a kanji character and in two or three cells, constructed the braille characters to reflect the visual appearance of the original kanji.
In 1966, Sadao Hasegawa, a blind teacher at a school for the blind in Tokyo, created a six-dot braille system for brailling kanji called tenkanji. Hasegawa’s six-dot code took a very different approach from that of Kawakami. Each kanji character in six-dot tenkanji occupies three or four braille cells. Each character begins with a kanji indicator and is constructed from among several elements’ (semantic, phonetic, and so forth) of the character in an effort to avoid confusion with other characters.
5 strokes.
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10 strokes.
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