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OH! I HAVE AN O WITH A DOT OVER IT. WHAT NOW?

Lynnette Taylor

In some pronunciation tables, modifiers occur that do not appear in the list given in Section 4.2 of The Rules of Unified English Braille. One of them is the letter "o" with a dot over it: ȯ. A similar "dot over" symbol appears in Section 12 of the Guidelines for Technical Material: .=^4, which is called “dot over previous item.” However, that symbol is not approved for literary elements.

Why can’t we use the technical dot for the literary dot? Appendix 3: Symbols List in The Rules of Unified English Braille notes that the "dot over previous item" symbol is referenced for technical usage in conjunction with the Guidelines for Technical Material. Hence, that symbol is considered technical in nature. More importantly, in literary braille, modifiers must precede the letter, while in technical material, modifiers are transcribed after the affected letter or number.

So, what now? The only answer is a transcriber-defined modifier. If this is the first instance of a modified letter without a specific braille symbol, then the first listed transcriber-defined modifier is used: .=^_1. (Transcriber-defined modifiers are the last three items listed at the beginning of Section 4.2.) The last example in 4.2.1 shows a mid-word example, which uses a dot over a g. So, taken together, a dot over an "o" would be transcribed as: ^_1o.

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