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
English alphabet is a ligature for the letters "Et". In English and many other languages it is used to represent the word "and" and occasionally the Latin word "et", as in the abbreviation "&c" (et cetera). The apostrophe, while not considered part of the English alphabet, is used to contract English words. A few pairs of words, such as "its" (belonging to "it") and "it's" ("it is" or "it has"), "were" (form of 'to be') and "we're" (we are), and "shed" (to get rid of) and "she'd" ("she would" or "she had") are distinguished in writing only by the presence or absence