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,
Phonological history of English high back vowels a result, "ruin" is pronounced as monosyllabic and "fluid" is pronounced . Phonological history of English high back vowels Most dialects of modern English have two high back vowels: the near-close near-back rounded vowel found in words like "foot", and the close back rounded vowel (realized as central in many dialects) found in words like "goose". This article discusses the history of these vowels in various dialects of English, focusing in particular on phonemic splits and mergers involving these sounds. In the Old English vowel system, there was a pair of short and long high back vowels, and , both