Irish Braille

Irish Braille
Script type
alphabet
Print basis
Irish alphabet
LanguagesIrish
Related scripts
Parent systems

Irish Braille is the braille alphabet of the Irish language. It is augmented by specifically Irish letters for vowels with acute accents in print:

⠯ (braille pattern dots-12346) ⠿ (braille pattern dots-123456) ⠷ (braille pattern dots-12356) ⠮ (braille pattern dots-2346) ⠾ (braille pattern dots-23456)
á é í ó ú

é and ú are coincidentally the French Braille letters for é and ù: They are simply the braille letters of the third decade after z, assigned to print in alphabetical order.

Irish Braille also uses some of the Grade-1+12 shortcuts of English Braille,

⠡ (braille pattern dots-16) ⠣ (braille pattern dots-126) ⠩ (braille pattern dots-146) ⠹ (braille pattern dots-1456) ⠫ (braille pattern dots-1246) ⠻ (braille pattern dots-12456) ⠌ (braille pattern dots-34) ⠬ (braille pattern dots-346) ⠜ (braille pattern dots-345) ⠂ (braille pattern dots-2) ⠒ (braille pattern dots-25) ⠲ (braille pattern dots-256) ⠤ (braille pattern dots-36) ⠢ (braille pattern dots-26) ⠔ (braille pattern dots-35)
ch gh sh th ed er st ing ar* ea con dis com† en in

* only has the value ar in prose. In poetry, it is used to mark a new line, like "/" in print.

†Abolished in Updated Irish Braille (see below)

These shortcuts are not used across elements of compound words. For example, in uiscerian (uisce-rian) "aqueduct", e-r is spelled out, as is s-t in trastomhas (tras-tomhas) "diameter". There are no special braille letters for dotted consonants. The letter h is used instead, as in modern print. A shortcut may be used even when the final consonant is lenited with h; comh, for example, is written com-h.

The only word-sign is the letter s for agus "and".

Traditionally the letters j k q v w x y z were not part of the Irish alphabet, but apart from w they have been introduced through English loans, so they occur in Irish Braille. Punctuation is the same as in English Braille.