Hawaiian alphabet Hawaiian alphabet The Hawaiian alphabet (in ) is an alphabet used to write Hawaiian. It was adapted from the English alphabet in the early 19th century by American missionaries to print a bible in the Hawaiian language. In 1778, British explorer James Cook made the first reported Europe voyage to Hawaii. In his report, he wrote the name of the islands as "Owhyhee" or "Owhyee". In 1822, a writing system based on one similar to the new "New Zealand Grammar" was developed and printed by American Protestant missionary Elisha Loomis. The original alphabet included five vowels and twelve consonants: and
Gold Coast alphabet these. (The vowels have a hollow sound to them, whereas the non- vowels sound rather like the lax vowels of English.) In modern Akan, seven vowel letters are used, with two of them being ambiguous. In addition, the Gold Coast script used a tilde to mark nasal vowels, which are not marked in modern Akan. <nowiki>*</nowiki> The allophone of produced by vowel harmony with vowels is not itself in Asante dialect, but nonetheless is markedly distinct from the allophone. It is not distinguished from in either orthography. In the Fante dialect, it has merged with . (See International Phonetic Alphabet