Well, after all, why not?
Everybody else is going off-topic...
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Cimarosti Marco
> Sent: 1999 September 23, Thursday 18.50
> To: 'Scott Horne'
> Cc: 'peter_constable@sil.org'
> Subject: RE: REPLY: Foriegn lang. credit for braille / FW: Braille...
>
> The English braille with abbreviations is called Grade 2.
>
> But even the easier Grade 1 has a few features that can make a computer
> crazy.
> For instance, digits 1-9 and 0 have the same patterns as letters A-I and
> J.
>
> There is a sort of "escape character" to signal that a sequence is a
> number, but a friend told me that this character is often not used (by
> Italian blinds, at least) when it is clear by the context that the
> sequence is a number (e.g. "Have an happy 2000" makes more sense than
> "Have an happy BJJJ"). The fact, is that what is "clear" to humans is not
> always so clear to computers.
>
> However, Peter is right saying that the situation of Chinese braille is
> much harder: Chinese blind people write using a phonetic system, and this
> cuts them off from a considerable part of the culture of their community.
>
> Computers are expected to help, but converting text from ideographs to
> sounds and back without really "understanding" is a very difficult task,
> due to the great number of homophones and homographs in Chinese.
>
> Regards.
> Marco Cimarosti
>
> (I did not post this to the list because I don't want to be the one who
> gets his ears pulled by Sarasvati for going continuously off topic :-)
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Scott Horne [SMTP:shorne@metaphasetech.com]
> Sent: 1999 September 23, Thursday 18.04
> To: Unicode List
> Cc: Unicode List
> Subject: Re: REPLY: Foriegn lang. credit for braille / FW: Braille...
>
> peter_constable@sil.org wrote:
> >
> > It just happens that there is a very
> > simple mapping between Latin-for-English and
> > Braille-for-English, but (apparently) the mapping between
> > Han-for-Chinese and Braille-for-Chinese is at all simple
> > (indeed, not algorithmic).
>
> There is no simple mapping between braille and the usual
> orthography for English. In order to reduce the bulk of
> written materials and save the reader's time, braille
> employs many standard abbreviations that do not correspond
> to anything in the printed script. No simple algorithm
> has the sensitivity and judgement required to produce a
> braille transcription reliably.
>
> Scott Horne
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.2 : Tue Jul 10 2001 - 17:20:53 EDT