Japanese Braille

Common punctuation marks tend to follow standard international values, with several doing double-duty with the w- series of kana braille.

In kana, a small tsu (っ), called sokuon, is used to indicate that the following consonant is geminate, and in interjections as a glottal stop.

This also looks like a half dash in braille:[3] The placement of these blocks mirrors the equivalent kana: the sokuon indicates that the following consonant is geminate, whereas the chōon indicates that the preceding vowel is long.

Two kana are fused into a single syllable by writing the second small, as in きゃ kya from ki + ya; this is called yōon.

Unlike kana, which uses a subscript e, in braille the -ye in foreign borrowings is written with yōon and the kana from the e row: that is, kye, she, che, nye, hye, mye, rye, voiced gye, je, bye, and plosive pye are written with the yōon prefixes plus ke, se, te, ne, he, me, re.

Gōyōon may also be combined with the vowels i, e, o for foreign wi, we, wo (now that the w in the original Japanese kana for wi, we, wo is silent); with ha, hi, he, ho for fa, fi, fe, fo and (when voiced) for va, vi, ve, vo; and with ta, chi, te, to for tsa, tsi, tse, tso.

In an assignment that is counter-intuitive in kana, yōon + handakuten is prefixed to tsu, yu, yo to produce tyu, fyu, fyo in foreign words, and voiced for dyu, vyu, vyo.

However, there are three discrepancies: Besides the punctuation of Japanese, braille also has symbols to indicate that the following characters are digits or the Latin alphabet.

Because the syllables a i u e o and ra ri ru re ro are homographic with the digits 0–9, a hyphen is inserted to separate them.

There are both a six dot system, tenkanji and an eight-dot extension of Japanese Braille kantenji, that have been devised to transcribe kanji.