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
Phonological history of English high front vowels corresponded to similar Old English vowels, while came from Old English . For other possible histories, see English historical vowel correspondences. In particular, the long vowels sometimes arose from short vowels, via Middle English open syllable lengthening or other processes. For example, "team" comes from an originally long Old English vowel, while "eat" comes from an originally short vowel that underwent lengthening; the distinction between these two groups of words is still preserved in a few dialects, as noted in the following section. Middle English was shortened in certain words. Both long and short forms of such words often existed