Language Matters | Louis Braille’s 19th-century invention remains a boon to visually impaired Chinese readers

Six small dots, arranged like those representing the number six on a die, raised in different patterns: this is the basis for the Braille alphabet for the visually impaired, with each fingertip-readable pattern representing a letter, numeral, punctuation mark or symbol. It’s not a language but a code that can be used for many languages.

Louis Braille, born in 1809, was blinded by accident and infection as a small boy. Later, while attending the Royal Institute for Blind Youth in Paris, the 12-year-old was inspired by a code – devised by Charles Barbier, a retired captain in Napoléon Bonaparte’s army – that employed arrangements of 12 raised dots (to represent sounds rather than letters) and permitted silent battlefield communication at night.

The system was called sonography, or “night writing”, and though it proved too complex for its intended purpose, Braille mastered it, then adapted it, and finally presented his six-dot system based on the alphabet in 1824.

Codes for the world’s languages have been devised with reference to Louis Braille’s original assignments for the French alphabet. For non-Latin scripts, correspondences are based on orthographic or phonetic values, or historical connections. The Greek μ (mu) and the Arabic م (mim) use the code for “m”; the Greek γ (gamma) uses the code for “g” as it is romanised, not “c” as per its alphabetic order or its historical relation to the Latin letter c.