This card was in the familiar raised dots of the Braille code, developed in the 1820s by Louis Braille to enable blind people to read. Both pages of this year’s card were in Braille, genuinely hand-embossed with the proper tool on the correct manilla, and were sent with a copy of Standard English Braille, Grades I and II, 1971 Edition, kindly provided by the Royal National Institute for the Blind (now the Royal National Institute of Blind People) in return for a donation.
There is a nearly one-to-one correspondence between the letters, punctuation marks, and spaces of normal printing and single cells of Grade I, or uncontracted, Braille. Grade II Braille, though, allows various sorts of economies which reduce the number of cells of Braille necessary. Various features of Grade II Braille were used in the card’s messages.
Front page
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These cells represent:
CS CS h a p p y
CS CS ch r i st m a s
– where “CS” is the capital sign.
Note that “ch” and “st” are one-celled contractions in Grade II Braille. The capital sign makes the following letter a capital; two capital signs preceding a word capitalise the whole word. So this translates to:
Inside page
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These cells represent:
CS b r i a n SP CS b ar k er SP e x t en d s SP ff SP y the com p l i LS t s SP of the SP s ea s o n . CS th SP c ar d SP for the SP DP t SP CS l ou i s SP CS b r l w d SP h SP c a l l ed “ IS LS CS n o ed l ” SP com e s h and - c r a f t ed SP ( y e s SP - SP e SP d o t ff ) SP in the SP s y st e m SP ( CS g r a d e SP CS CS i i SP u s ed D5 h ) SP in v en t ed SP by h m SP in SP NS a h b d SP a s SP a NS a e - y ea r - o l d SP st u d en t .– where SP is a space, LS is the letter sign, DP is the decimal point, IS is the italic sign, D5 is dot 5, and NS is the number sign.
There are more one-celled contractions here: ar, er, en, the, com, of, ea, for, ou, ed, and, and in. Some of these are not chosen at random: “en” is the sign for “e” moved down to the “lower position”, as is “in” the lower form of the sign for “i”.
There are also two varieties of two-celled contraction: initial compound signs and a final compound sign. (These terms relate not to the position of the sign within a word, but to the position that the single letter used to represent a word or syllable occupies within that word or syllable.) So the decimal point followed by “t” represents “time”, dot 5 followed by “h” represents “here” (both initial compound signs), and the letter sign followed by “t” represents “ment” (a final compound sign).
There are also word signs: standing alone, “y” represents the word “you”, the one-celled contraction “ff” (which is the lower form of “f” and means “!” when at the end of a word) represents “to”, the one-celled contraction “th” represents “this”, “h” represents “have”, and “e” represents “every”. (In context, these forms would have to be preceded by the letter sign in order to represent their simpler meanings.)
There are also examples of abbreviated words: “brl” represents “braille” (strangely but consistently written with lower-case initial in the guide; I prefer “Braille” – in the manner of “French” rather than of “french windows”), “wd” represents “would”, and “hm” represents “him”.
After the number sign, the letters “a” to “j” represent the digits 1 to 9 and 0. So “NS a h b d” represents “1824” and “NS a e” represents “15”.
When a word is preceded by the letter sign, each sign within the word represents a single letter and not a contraction. So what would otherwise be “ed” in “n o ed l” represents the modified letter “ë” (e-diaeresis) instead. (There are rules that determine the order of the signs “IS LS CS” before this word.)
Three cell spaces are used to indicate the start of a paragraph (which need not, in fact, start on a new line). Other economies of space are achieved by closing up some forms where there would be a space in normal printing, e.g. between “of” and “the”, “for” and “the”, and “by” and “him”.
So this all translates to:
Now I have revisited all this in 2000, it seems to me that there are perhaps two mistakes: that the “to” and “you” should have been closed up (though the rules are not particularly clear) and that the hyphen after “yes” should have been two consecutive hyphen characters, representing a dash.
Version 26: Revised 13 December 2017
Brian Barker