Hawaiian alphabet Hawaiian alphabet The Hawaiian alphabet (in ) is an alphabet used to write Hawaiian. It was adapted from the English alphabet in the early 19th century by American missionaries to print a bible in the Hawaiian language. In 1778, British explorer James Cook made the first reported Europe voyage to Hawaii. In his report, he wrote the name of the islands as "Owhyhee" or "Owhyee". In 1822, a writing system based on one similar to the new "New Zealand Grammar" was developed and printed by American Protestant missionary Elisha Loomis. The original alphabet included five vowels and twelve consonants: and
English orthography Many loanwords come from languages where the pronunciation of vowels corresponds to the way they were pronounced in Old English, which is similar to the Italian or Spanish pronunciation of the vowels, and is the value the vowel symbols and have in the International Phonetic Alphabet. As a result, there is a somewhat regular system of pronouncing "foreign" words in English, and some borrowed words have had their spelling changed to conform to this system. For example, "Hindu" used to be spelled "Hindoo", and the name "Maria" used to be pronounced like the name "Mariah", but was changed to conform