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
Gold Coast alphabet these. (The vowels have a hollow sound to them, whereas the non- vowels sound rather like the lax vowels of English.) In modern Akan, seven vowel letters are used, with two of them being ambiguous. In addition, the Gold Coast script used a tilde to mark nasal vowels, which are not marked in modern Akan. <nowiki>*</nowiki> The allophone of produced by vowel harmony with vowels is not itself in Asante dialect, but nonetheless is markedly distinct from the allophone. It is not distinguished from in either orthography. In the Fante dialect, it has merged with . (See International Phonetic Alphabet