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 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