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,
Checked and free vowels Checked and free vowels In phonetics and phonology, checked vowels are those that commonly stand in a stressed closed syllable; and free vowels are those that commonly stand in a stressed open syllable. The terms "checked vowel" and "free vowel" originated in English phonetics and phonology. They are seldom used for the description of other languages even though a distinction between vowels that usually have to be followed by a consonant and other vowels is common in most Germanic languages. The terms "checked vowel" and "free vowel" correspond closely to the terms "lax vowel" and "tense vowel" respectively, but many