Talk:⠼

Ordering of Characters.

@Kwamikagami: I'm having some problem with definitions such as 'the 53rd character of the braille script'. Now, the first 40 positions have been the same since Braille was first published in 1829, and the next 10 can be justified by the heading 'numeric sequence' in tables such as at w:French Braille#History, but for the next 13 numbering relies on an arrangement in 7 lines, which I can only clearly trace back to 1996 (chart attributed to Encyclopedia Britannia currently at http://cstwiki.wtb.tue.nl/index.php?title=PRE2019_3_Group4 or 7 line list in Peter T. Daniels & William Bright, editor (1996), The World's Writing Systems, →ISBN, page 816), but I have found line 6 quoted in the 1955 paper at https://aclanthology.org/www.mt-archive.info/MT-1955-Cleave.pdf. Daniels and Bright may be interpreted as taking the seven line arrangement from Madeleine Seymour Loomis (1943) The Braille Reference Book [for Grades I, I½ and II], New York: Harper, but I can't verify that she used the 7-line presentation.

I propose to reference definitions for 51st to 63rd to Daniels and Bright. Alternatively, we could present the seven line catalogue in Appendix:Braille, with references, and reference the appendix for the ordering. What say you? --RichardW57 (talk) 04:43, 13 November 2022 (UTC)

@RichardW57 I agree with you that that was ignorant of me, and didn't believe I was responsible until I checked the page history. But I'd go further: we shouldn't say that any of the characters have a specific order value. I'm not sure we can even order all the letters in English Braille, but we certainly can't for the script as a whole, any more than we can for the Latin script. For example, M is the 5th letter of the Hawaiian alphabet, the 6th of the Tahitian alphabet, the 11th of the Italian alphabet, the 12th of the Latin alphabet, the 13th of the English alphabet, the 16th of the Turkish alphabet, the 17th of the Polish alphabet, and the 20th of the Czech alphabet. It's therefore gibberish to say that it's the Xth letter of the Latin script, independent of any particular alphabet. The same's true of Braille. I'm not even sure we can say that ⠁ is the first -- do you know the sorting order of Thai braille, and whether ⠁ is the first letter? But even if ⠁ is universally first, things break down after that. kwami (talk) 05:03, 13 November 2022 (UTC)

It's also dubious to identify an alphabet only by the name of the language - some letters come and go, e.g. 'j' and 'k' in the Welsh alphabet. The Welsh letter 'c' used to soften in Welsh (before the printers of the Welsh bible ran out of 'k'). Do you even know the sorting order of English Braille?

Now, I have seen reference to the numeric order of the Braille cells, but I wouldn't push it beyond 40. One translingual feature is the assignment of cells to decimal digits, even though the corresponding kana readings in Japanese Braille goes a, i, u, ru, ra, e, re, ri, o, ro.

OK, I think we can preserve some of the ordering. We can have two formats:

The 39th pattern of the Braille script in the listing by decades

and

The 53rd pattern of the Braille script as presented in seven lines[]

where '[]' denotes a referencing to the appendix. The values 1st to 50th are useful, as some languages' rules can reference cell use by decade. I'll modify the appendix to give the two presentations involving the decades. --RichardW57 (talk) 15:55, 13 November 2022 (UTC)

One can't sort Thai Braille exactly the same way as printed Thai - เฉพาะ (chà-pɔ́) and abandoned reformed spelling ฉเพาะ are written the same in Braille, but sort either side of ฉาก (chàak). RichardW57 (talk) 16:18, 13 November 2022 (UTC)