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
Regional accents of English pronunciation of "pearl" in some variants of Scottish English can sound like the entirely unrelated word "petal" to an American ear. For a summary of the differences between accents, see International Phonetic Alphabet chart for English dialects. English dialects differ greatly in their pronunciation of open vowels. In Received Pronunciation, there are four open back vowels, , but in General American there are only three, , and in most dialects of Canadian English only two, . In addition, which words have which vowel varies between dialects. Words like "bath" and "cloth" have the vowels in Received Pronunciation, but in General