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
Sogdian alphabet as an abjad, but it also displays tendencies towards an alphabet. The script consists of 17 consonants, many of which have alternative forms for initial, middle, and final position. As in the Aramaic alphabet, long vowels were commonly written with matres lectionis, the consonants "aleph", "yodh" and "waw". However, unlike Aramaic and most abjads, these consonant signs would also sometimes serve to express the short vowels (which could also sometimes be left unexpressed as in the parent systems). To disambiguate long vowels from short ones, an additional aleph could be written before the sign denoting the long vowel. The alphabet