Alphabet alphabet is sometimes claimed to be as small, but it actually consists of 18 letters, including the ʻokina and five long vowels. However, Hawaiian Braille has only 13 letters.) While Rotokas has a small alphabet because it has few phonemes to represent (just eleven), Book Pahlavi was small because many letters had been "conflated"—that is, the graphic distinctions had been lost over time, and diacritics were not developed to compensate for this as they were in Arabic, another script that lost many of its distinct letter shapes. For example, a comma-shaped letter represented "g", "d", "y", "k", or "j". However,
English alphabet is a ligature for the letters "Et". In English and many other languages it is used to represent the word "and" and occasionally the Latin word "et", as in the abbreviation "&c" (et cetera). The apostrophe, while not considered part of the English alphabet, is used to contract English words. A few pairs of words, such as "its" (belonging to "it") and "it's" ("it is" or "it has"), "were" (form of 'to be') and "we're" (we are), and "shed" (to get rid of) and "she'd" ("she would" or "she had") are distinguished in writing only by the presence or absence