The Reading Room

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1:44 AM

Q: How were plays in Shakespeare's time advertised?

How were plays in Tudor/Jacobean England advertised (e.g. did they use posters, street-hawkers, etc.)? And how much information would these advertisements have contained? Would an advertisement have said "Much Ado About Nothing" is about two lovers called Beatrice and Benedict? Or would it have j...

Bookworm

2:11 AM

Q: Why is it notable that the "monkey tablet" has monkeys?

My literature professor has been very insistent on the importance of having an updated translation which incorporates recently-discovered (well, recent on the scale of Gilgamesh discoveries) sections of Tablet V. I was interested in what exactly the new stuff was and found an article excitedly co...

akkadian-literature epic-of-gilgamesh

4 hours later…

Bookworm

6:11 AM

Q: Biggest/oldest braille book?

What is the biggest book written in braille on the open market today? I’m not blind, just curious. For that matter what is the oldest braille book?

identification-request history-of-literature physical-books

Librarian

6:38 AM

Q: Braille tag shouldn’t there be one?

There should be a disabilities tag or at least a braille tag for books/media. Wouldn’t you agree?

discussion tags

3 hours later…

Bookworm

9:17 AM

Q: Ruin and Preservation in Mistborn; What is its relation with the human?

When one of these forces (Ruin or Preservation) is defeated, a human dies with it. But the force keeps going. Is the human an incarnation of the force, or is the human using the force?

brandon-sanderson mistborn

1 hour later…

Tsundoku

10:43 AM

@Librarian On a more general level, do we need a tag for every delivery format? audiobook has only four questions. braille may also get very few questions. We haven't created tags for e-book, clay-tablet, parchment or papyrus-scroll either. (We do actually have a question where papyrus or papyrus-scroll may be valid.)

5 hours later…

Eng Lit Learner

3:22 PM

Q: what does hiding an uneasy conscience with a judicial air mean

what does hiding an uneasy conscience with a judicial air mean ? ive' quoted it from pygmalion play by George Bernard Shaw

literature

b_jonas

3:41 PM

@Tsundoku and dead-tree. don't forget dead tree. it's among the most widely used format historically.

Plus there's also wax seals stamped from a metal seal die.

Or clay.

Bookworm

4:25 PM

Q: What is the oldest book written in braille?

What is the oldest complete book written in braille?

history-of-literature physical-books

b_jonas

Nah, I should move these to chat.

@Tsundoku re literature.stackexchange.com/questions/21680/…,

@Tsundoku I admit that I'm not very knowledgable here, and would like a better answer. But just because someone owns a braille edition doesn't mean that it comes from the open market. Just as I can get photocopies of chapters of books that I can only find in a library, even if there are no copies of the book that I can buy, you can also have a braille copy printed even if those copies aren't produced for the open market.

The difference again comes from the copyright law. It generally does not allow me to copy whole books, not even for personal use, which is why I only have photocopies of a few chapters. But there's a triple of exceptions: the reasonable one for making the books accessible for visually impaired people; the weird rule of copying by handwriting; and the evil rule where you can use almost anything for free as a backdrop in broadcast television programs.

I'd like to mention that unlike these stupid modern regulations about travel and covid and taxes, the law about copyright is written in an entirely readable language, with no ambiguity about which rules override what. That's why the three strong exceptions, the ones that override most of the limits of what you can do for personal use and education and research, stuck in my mind.

And I'll note that the part about vision impairment isn't special to Hungary, it's imported from some EU regulations.

The rule is net.jogtar.hu/jogszabaly?docid=99900076.TV#pr276id 41. § by the way, it's quite hard to find because it doesn't use the words that you expect.

(There's more than three of these exceptions, those are just the three notable ones.)

In any case, there are a very few braille editions that are mass-produced and so would be on the open market, of very popular books like Harry Potter or the Bible, but that's a rarity.

Rand al'Thor

5:26 PM

@Tsundoku There's no reasonable way Braille can be called a language, right? It's more like just a code for expressing spoken language (pretty much like any kind of writing, for that matter)? It may seem a stupid question, but until recently I'd assumed the same for sign language.

Now I wonder how (or if) Braille works in a language like Chinese which doesn't have an alphabet. And whether that would make a reasonable question for the site.

bobble

5:38 PM

From perkins.org/12-things-you-probably-dont-know-about-braille

> Braille is not a language. It’s a tactile alphabet that can be used to write almost any language. There are braille versions of Chinese, Spanish, Arabic, Hebrew and many others.

There are lots of contractions employed as well, including those that aren't usual in regular English

Tsundoku

Braille is a writing system. As far as I know, the trouble with applying it to Chinese is that it doesn't have enough codes to represent thousands of characters. If I remember correctly, Chinese Braille transcribes pinyin without tones and omitting the tones introduces a lot of ambiguity.

@bobble I'm sure that was meant to be perkins.org/12-things-you-probably-dont-know-about-braille

bobble

@Tsundoku yup

However, the message is too old to edit

Tsundoku

"Mandarin braille is based on the Pinyin Romanization." Mandarin at Duxbury Systems.

Q: Braille and Chinese Input

Is it possible to use a Braille keyboard to input chinese with the pinyin input method? How could a blind user ever be able to choose the right character combination if they cannot see it? The words could be read out in sound, but what about homophones (just think about proper people and place ...

pinyin writing

Contractions are different for every language (because frequent words are obviously different in each language). The number of levels of contractions also differs from language to language.

@b_jonas The proper analogy is probably with print-on-demand publishing. Even for sighted people, many books (well, at least a number of academic books and older titles that I own) are printed on demand after the original print run has been sold out.

b_jonas

5:58 PM

@Randal'Thor No, it's a writing systems to transcribe languages like English or French or Hungarian or Japanese that have other written forms too.

@Randal'Thor There is a very popular Japanese braille that encodes only kana writing, plus two different very rarely used systems to encode kanji too. Both of the latter are quite weird:

one uses dots above the normal 6-dot braille cell, which isn't even encoded in unicode, unlike the normal extension of two dots under the 6-dot braille cell that's used on braille terminals. The other uses only the normaly 6-dot braille cell: the weird part of that is that the normal Japanese braille already uses all 64 possible cells for something, yet this claims to be an extension of that.

I don't know about Chinese.

@Tsundoku Yes.

Tsundoku

@Bookworm I assume the connection between snake and lust is clear (ever since Freud). But I don't know about the Asmodeus from Judeo-Islamic lore.

b_jonas

Basically braille is not really one thing. Any writing system that you write with a stylus pecking holes on a paper through a braille grid in 2x3 dot braille grid cells, or printed or displayed with more modern techonology analogous to that, is called braille. That includes alphabets for multiple languages (sometimes even multiple minor age variants for the same language), many of them derived from French braille which is in term derived from the latin alphabet,

but eg. Japanese braille isn't related to it, it represents the kana directly; there's at least one genuine shorthand in braille that of course very few people use (because who would pay a secretary if they use it rather than a more efficient inked shorthand); at least one musical notation system; and even notation for math formulas.

Tsundoku

Braille math notations differ from country to country. In some countries, they may even differ from school to school (at least they used to in Germany, where at least four different math notations were in use around 15 years ago).

b_jonas

@Tsundoku Yeah, that's quite expected, but the situation is improving as the internet includes communications for everyone and will slowly homogenize everyone's language usage by allowing remote communities to connect more.

That applies to everything about language, not just braille in particular.

You can also consider it as the situation getting worse of course, with culture lost: 60 years ago you had to read five languages to read mathematics research, articles were written in german or russian or french or english randomly.

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