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
Old English Latin alphabet (also known as "Caroline") replaced the insular. The letter ðæt (called "eth" or "edh" in modern English) was an alteration of Latin , and the runic letters thorn and wynn are borrowings from futhorc. Also used was a symbol for the conjunction "and", a character similar to the number seven (, called a Tironian et or "ond"), and a symbol for the relative pronoun "þæt", a thorn with a crossbar through the ascender (). Macrons over vowels were rarely used to indicate long vowels. Also used occasionally were abbreviations for following "m"s or "n"s. A number of changes are traditionally