Karelian alphabet are from the ISO basic Latin alphabet, five are derived from basic Latin letters by the addition of diacritical marks, and the final character is the apostrophe, which signifies palatalization of the preceding sound. The entire range of sounds of native Karelian words is intended to be represented by this set of characters. This unified alphabet was approved in 2007 as a replacement for the separate Olonets Karelian and Karelian Proper alphabets. The letters Ä and Ö are vowels which, unlike the German umlauts, are considered to be distinct and are alphabetized separately from the corresponding vowels without the umlauts.
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