Type alphabet Time period 1868–1918 Unicode range (not supported) | Languages English Sister systems Braille | |
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Parent systems Night writing
New York Point | ||
New York Point is a braille-like system of tactile writing for the blind invented by William Bell Wait (1839–1916), a teacher in the New York Institute for the Education of the Blind. The system used one to four pairs of points set side by side, each containing one or two dots. (Letters of one through four pairs, each with two dots, would be ⟨:⟩ ⟨::⟩ ⟨:::⟩ ⟨::::⟩.) The most common letters are written with the fewest points, a strategy also employed by the competing American Braille.
Contents
Capital letters were cumbersome in New York Point, each being four dots wide, and so were not generally used. Likewise, the four-dot-wide hyphen and apostrophe were generally omitted. When capitals, hyphens, or apostrophes were used, they sometimes caused legibility problems, and a separate capital sign was never agreed upon. According to Helen Keller, this caused literacy problems among blind children, and was one of the chief arguments against New York Point and in favor of one of the braille alphabets.
New York Point competed with the American Braille alphabet, which consisted of fixed cells two points wide and three high. Books written in embossed alphabets like braille are quite bulky, and New York Point's system of two horizontal lines of dots was an advantage over the three lines required for braille; the principle of writing the most common letters with the fewest dots was likewise an advantage of New York Point and American Braille over English Braille.
Wait advocated the New York System as more logical than either the American Braille or the English Braille alphabets, and the three scripts competed in what was known as the War of the Dots. Around 1916, agreement settled on English Braille standardized to French Braille letter order, chiefly because of the superior punctuation compared to New York Point, the speed of reading braille, the large amount of written material available in English Braille compared to American Braille, and the international accessibility offered by following French alphabetical order.
Wait also invented the "Kleidograph", a typewriter with twelve keys for embossing New York Point on paper, and the "Stereograph", for creating metal plates to be used in printing.
Alphabet
New York Point is not supported by Unicode, as of version 6.3. In the charts below, the first row of NYP are graphic images, and the second row are braille cells turned on their side. Older browsers may not support the latter.
Like braille, there are contractions: single letters in NYP that correspond to sequences of letter in print, and sequences in NYP as well when capitalized.
Capitals are all 2×4 (8-dot blocks).
Punctuation
Like in braille, there is a number sign that converts letters to digits. The ten digits are the same four-dot patterns found in braille, but with entirely different values:
The only punctuation marks three-dots wide are the number sign above and the quotation mark, which has the same form as the letter q. The dash, hyphen, and apostrophe are four dots wide.
Musical notation
Notes are made by combining two 'primitives', which are the digits 1–7:
⟨⟩ is thus a whole C note, ⟨⟩ a quarter D note, etc. In chords, the length is only given for the first note mentioned.
These may be prefixed by ⟨⟩ ♯, ⟨⟩ ♭, or ⟨⟩ ♮, and suffixed by ⟨⟩ dot (length × 1½). These may be doubled, as in print.
The note is preceded by its octave, which is written as the number plus an upper dot: ⟨⟩ 5th 8va, ⟨⟩ 2nd 8va, etc.
Rests are two lower dots plus the length: ⟨⟩ a whole rest, ⟨⟩ a half rest, etc.
Chords are written as intervals, which is the number plus a lower dot: ⟨⟩ is a third, etc. The sign ⟨⟩ signals a change in octave. Thus a chord of three notes spanning the 4th to 5th octaves is
4th-8va C-whole 5th-inv'l with 5th-8va ESee Wait's publications for additional conventions.