Mark Williamson wrote:
Ok, thanks for explaining that. Is Braille a language or an orthography?
Braille is a tactile writing system which is used to write spoken languages. So basically, it's an orthography. Sometimes, though, different languages use different tactile alphabets.
It could be used as such, but in practice it's usually used as a tactile writing system to write *written* languages. For example, English braille is a direct transcription of written English between alphabets, including all the orthographic oddities of written English; it's not an independent representation of spoken English. It's so direct a transliteration of spoken English that Latin-alphabet English can be transliterated to English Braille by means of a very short computer program.
-Mark