Alphabet alphabet is sometimes claimed to be as small, but it actually consists of 18 letters, including the ʻokina and five long vowels. However, Hawaiian Braille has only 13 letters.) While Rotokas has a small alphabet because it has few phonemes to represent (just eleven), Book Pahlavi was small because many letters had been "conflated"—that is, the graphic distinctions had been lost over time, and diacritics were not developed to compensate for this as they were in Arabic, another script that lost many of its distinct letter shapes. For example, a comma-shaped letter represented "g", "d", "y", "k", or "j". However,
Phonological history of English high front vowels are homophones, but "bed", "bad" or "med", "mad" are kept distinct. For others, it occurs in all positions. The "met"–"mate" merger is a phenomenon occurring for some speakers of Zulu English in which and are both pronounced . As a result, the words "met" and "mate" are homophonous as . Phonological history of English high front vowels The high and mid-height front vowels of English (vowels of "i" and "e" type) have undergone a variety of changes over time, often varying from dialect to dialect. Middle English had a long close front vowel , and two long mid front vowels: