Benjamin Franklin's phonetic alphabet as follows: Franklin's proposed alphabet included seven letters to represent vowels. This set consisted of two new letters, in addition to five letters from the existing English alphabet: a, e, i, o, u. The first new letter was a formed as a ligature of the letters o and a, and used to represent the sound (as written in IPA). The second, ɥ, was used for . Franklin proposed the use of doubled letters to represent what he called long vowels, represented by modern phonemes thus: as the long-vowel variant for (or, in his notation, "cɩcɩ" versus "cɩ"), for ("ee" versus
Checked and free vowels Checked and free vowels In phonetics and phonology, checked vowels are those that commonly stand in a stressed closed syllable; and free vowels are those that commonly stand in a stressed open syllable. The terms "checked vowel" and "free vowel" originated in English phonetics and phonology. They are seldom used for the description of other languages even though a distinction between vowels that usually have to be followed by a consonant and other vowels is common in most Germanic languages. The terms "checked vowel" and "free vowel" correspond closely to the terms "lax vowel" and "tense vowel" respectively, but many