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
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