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
Romic alphabet the back unrounded vowels and the value of for IPA (but also for English "bird", in broad notation), Sweet's notation is essentially that of the IPA. Italic a takes its traditional shape, which would later be made distinct in the IPA. That is, italic a was , and italic ɐ, . Long vowels are written double. Nasal vowels with an italic nasal consonant letter, such as or (for French) . These are defined by Sweet as: The lax vowels are defined by Sweet as: The 1877 version of the Romic alphabet differed rather substantially from the 1892 version. It was