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
Phonological history of English high back vowels Phonological history of English high back vowels Most dialects of modern English have two high back vowels: the near-close near-back rounded vowel found in words like "foot", and the close back rounded vowel (realized as central in many dialects) found in words like "goose". This article discusses the history of these vowels in various dialects of English, focusing in particular on phonemic splits and mergers involving these sounds. In the Old English vowel system, there was a pair of short and long high back vowels, and , both written (the longer vowel is often distinguished as in modern editions of