the french alphabet has 26 letters.
the french alphabet has 26 letters.
how many letters does the french alphabet have?
26
in general, only the assignments of the basic 26 letters of the french alphabet are retained in other braille alphabets. for example, among the additional letters, in german braille only "ü" and "ö" coincide with french braille. however, there are several alphabets which are much more closely related. italian braille is identical to the french apart from doubling up french braille "ò" to italian "ó" and "ò", since french has no "ó". indeed, a principal difference of these alphabets is the remapping of french vowels with a grave accent ("à è ì ò ù") to an acute accent ("á é í ó ú"), as the french alphabet does not support acute accents apart from "é". spanish changes all five of these vowels, as well as taking "ü". portuguese braille is also very similar to the french, though the shift of grave to acute accents necessitated a chain of other changes, such as circumflex to grave, and the portuguese tildes were taken from french diaereses (portuguese "ã õ" for french "ä ö/œ"). the continental scandinavian languages took the extended french letters "â" (for "å"), "ä/æ", and "ö/ø". vietnamese braille is also quite similar, though it has added tone letters, and according uses french "z" for "d", which is pronounced like "z".
french braille
braille is in its origin a numeric code. louis braille applied the characters in numerical order to the french alphabet in alphabetical order. as braille spread to other languages, the numeric order was retained and applied to the local script. therefore, where the alphabetical order differed from that of french, the new braille alphabet would be incompatible with french braille. for example, french was based on a 25-letter alphabet without a "w". when braille was adopted for english in the united states, the letters were applied directly to the english alphabet, so that braille letter of french "x" became english "w", french "y" became english "x", french "z" english "y", and french "ç" english "z". in the united kingdom, however, french braille was adopted without such reordering. therefore, any english book published in braille needed to be typeset separately for the united states and the united kingdom. similarly, the letters for egyptian arabic braille were assigned their forms based on their nearest french equivalents, so that for example arabic "d" had the same braille letters as french "d". for algerian arabic braille, however, the braille characters were assigned to the arabic alphabet according to the arabic alphabetical order, so that algerian "d" was the same character as egyptian "h". thus an arabic book published in algeria was utterly unintelligible to blind egyptians and vice versa.
international uniformity of braille alphabets