IPA Braille

IPA Braille is the modern standard Braille encoding of the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA), as recognized by the International Council on English Braille. A braille version of the IPA was first created by Merrick and Potthoff in 1934, and published in London. It was used in France, Germany, and anglophone countries. However, it was not updated as the IPA evolved, and by 1989 had become obsolete. In 1990 it was officially reissued by BAUK, but in a corrupted form that made it largely unworkable. In 1997 BANA created a completely new system for the United States and Canada. However, it was incompatible with braille IPA elsewhere in the world and in addition proved to be cumbersome and often inadequate. In 2008 Robert Englebretson revised the Merrick and Potthoff notation and by 2011 this had been accepted by BANA. It is largely true to the original in consonants and vowels, though the diacritics were completely reworked, as necessitated by the major revisions in print IPA diacritics since 1934. The diacritics were also made more systematic, and follow rather than precede the base letters. However, it has no general procedure for marking tone, and not all diacritics can be written. IPA Braille does not use the conventions of English Braille. It is set off by slash or square brackets, which indicate that the intervening material is IPA rather than national orthography. Thus brackets are required in braille even when not used in print.