Hawaiian alphabet not make it a letter of the alphabet. In publishing the Hawaiian Bible, they used the okina to distinguish ' ('my') from ' ('your'). It was not until 1864 that the okina became a recognized letter of the Hawaiian alphabet. As early as 1821, one of the missionaries, Hiram Bingham, was using macrons in making handwritten transcriptions of Hawaiian vowels. The macron, or "", was used to differentiate between short and long vowels. The current official Hawaiian alphabet consists of 12 letters: five vowels (A a, E e, I i, O o, U u) and seven consonants (H h, K
English alphabet "i", were introduced in the 16th century, and "w" assumed the status of an independent letter. The variant lowercase form long s (ſ) lasted into early modern English, and was used in non-final position up to the early 19th century. Today, the English alphabet is now considered to consist of the following 26 letters: Written English has a number of digraphs, but they are not considered separate letters of the alphabet: Outside of professional papers on specific subjects that traditionally use ligatures in loanwords, ligatures are seldom used in modern English. The ligatures "æ" and "œ" were until the 19th