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,
Silent English alphabet Silent English alphabet A silent English alphabet is a list of English words, each containing a silent letter from A to Z. The term was coined by the linguist John Higgins who produced an early version of such a list in 1983. There are many reasons why English spelling has such a high usage of silent letters. English has been borrowing words when needed from more than 350 other languages. Some of those words had sounds not used in English, and the spelling was not always adapted to reflect this. An example is the sometimes-silent "t" in tsunami. After the