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,
Mandaic alphabet the alphabet. Rather than the ancient Semitic names for the letters ("aleph", "beth", "gimel"), the letters are known as "a", "ba", "ga" and so on. It is written from right to left in horizontal lines. It is a cursive script, but not all letters connect within a word. Spaces separate individual words. The Mandaic alphabet contains 22 letters (in the same order as the Aramaic alphabet) and the digraph "adu". The alphabet is formally closed by repeating the first letter, "a", so that it has a symbolic count of 24 letters: Unlike most other Semitic alphabets, vowels are usually written