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 Old English texts). There was also a pair of back vowels of mid-height, and , written (the longer one often in modern editions). The same four vowels existed in the Middle English system. The short vowels were still spelt and , but long came to be spelt as , and as . Generally the Middle English vowels descended from the corresponding Old English ones, although there were certain alternative developments – see Phonological history of Old English#Changes leading up to Middle and Modern English. Due to Middle English open syllable lengthening, short was mostly lengthened to (an opener back vowel)