Hawaiian alphabet not make it a letter of the alphabet. In publishing the Hawaiian Bible, they used the okina to distinguish ' ('my') from ' ('your'). It was not until 1864 that the okina became a recognized letter of the Hawaiian alphabet. As early as 1821, one of the missionaries, Hiram Bingham, was using macrons in making handwritten transcriptions of Hawaiian vowels. The macron, or "", was used to differentiate between short and long vowels. The current official Hawaiian alphabet consists of 12 letters: five vowels (A a, E e, I i, O o, U u) and seven consonants (H h, K
Phonological history of English low back vowels English, the vowel in words such as "thought," "force," and "north," which merged earlier on in these varieties of English, undergoes a conditional split based on syllable structure: closed syllables have a higher vowel quality such as [oː] (possibly even [oʊ] in broad Cockney varieties), and open syllables have a lower vowel quality [ɔ̝ː] or a centering diphthong [ɔə]. Originally-open syllables with an inflectional suffix (such as "bored") retain the lower vowel quality, creating minimal pairs such as "bored" vs. "board" . The merger is a merger of the English vowels and that is used by many female speakers of