Benjamin Franklin's phonetic alphabet as follows: Franklin's proposed alphabet included seven letters to represent vowels. This set consisted of two new letters, in addition to five letters from the existing English alphabet: a, e, i, o, u. The first new letter was a formed as a ligature of the letters o and a, and used to represent the sound (as written in IPA). The second, ɥ, was used for . Franklin proposed the use of doubled letters to represent what he called long vowels, represented by modern phonemes thus: as the long-vowel variant for (or, in his notation, "cɩcɩ" versus "cɩ"), for ("ee" versus
Phonological history of English high front vowels 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: the close-mid and the open-mid . The three vowels generally correspond to the modern spellings , and respectively, although other spellings are also possible. The spellings that became established in Early Modern English are mostly still used today, although the qualities of the sounds have changed significantly. These and generally