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,
Cardinal vowels the opposite side of the front-back dimension, so that e.g. Cardinal 1 can be produced with rounding somewhat similar to that of Cardinal 8 (though normally compressed rather than protruded); these are known as 'secondary cardinal vowels'. Sounds such as these are claimed to be less common in the world's languages. Other vowel sounds are also recognised on the vowel chart of the International Phonetic Alphabet. In the , the cardinal vowels have the same numbers used above, but added to 300. The usual explanation of the cardinal vowel system implies that the competent user can reliably distinguish between sixteen