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
Deseret alphabet Furthermore, unlike the typeset alphabet, the cursive alphabet has no letter case. These characteristics could have arisen because Watt was a local expert in Pitman shorthand, which is written in a similar way. The table below shows some examples of how the cursive form is written. Dropped vowels are marked in parenthesis. George D. Watt found his own alphabet cumbersome to write and abandoned it. As he wrote to Brigham Young on 21 August 1854: His new alphabet closely resembled an 1853 publication of Isaac Pitman, containing only 33 letters. However, at this point, Young was still enamored with the