The Hawaiian alphabet (in haw, ka pīʻāpā Hawaiʻi) is an

alphabet An alphabet is a standardized set of basic written graphemes (called letters) that represent the phonemes of certain spoken languages. Not all writing systems represent language in this way; in a syllabary, each character represents a syllab ...

used to write Hawaiian. It was adapted from the

English alphabet The alphabet for Modern English is a Latin-script alphabet consisting of 26 letters, each having an upper- and lower-case form. The word ''alphabet'' is a compound of the first two letters of the Greek alphabet, ''alpha'' and '' beta''. ...

in the early 19th century by American missionaries to print a

bible The Bible (from Koine Greek , , 'the books') is a collection of religious texts or scriptures that are held to be sacred in Christianity, Judaism, Samaritanism, and many other religions. The Bible is an anthologya compilation of texts ...

in the Hawaiian language.

Origins

In 1778, British explorer James Cook made the first reported European voyage to

Hawaii Hawaii ( ; haw, Hawaii or ) is a state in the Western United States, located in the Pacific Ocean about from the U.S. mainland. It is the only U.S. state outside North America, the only state that is an archipelago, and the only state ...

. 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 Protestantism is a branch of Christianity that follows the theological tenets of the Protestant Reformation, a movement that began seeking to reform the Catholic Church from within in the 16th century against what its followers perceived to b ...

missionary Elisha Loomis. The original alphabet included five vowels and seven consonants: : A, E, I, O, U, H, K, L, M, N, P, W, and seven

diphthongs A diphthong ( ; , ), also known as a gliding vowel, is a combination of two adjacent vowel sounds within the same syllable. Technically, a diphthong is a vowel with two different targets: that is, the tongue (and/or other parts of the speech ...

: : AE, AI, AO, AU, EI, EU, OU In addition, the letters F, G, S, Y, and Z were used to spell foreign words. In 1826, the developers voted to eliminate some of the letters which represented functionally redundant interchangeable letters, enabling the Hawaiian alphabet to approach the ideal state of one-symbol-one-sound, and thereby optimizing the ease with which people could teach and learn the reading and writing of Hawaiian. * Interchangeable B/P. B was dropped, P was kept * Interchangeable L/R/D. L was kept, R and D were dropped * Interchangeable K/T/D. K was kept, T and D were dropped * Interchangeable V/W. V was dropped, W was kept

Okina

Due to words with different meanings being spelled alike, use of the glottal stop became desirable. As early as 1823, the missionaries made limited use of the apostrophe to represent the glottal stop, but they did 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.

Kahakō

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.

Modern alphabet

The current official Hawaiian alphabet consists of 13 letters: five vowels (A a, E e, I i, O o, and U u) and eight consonants (H h, K k, L l, M m, N n, P p, W w, and ). Alphabetic order differs from the normal Latin order in that the vowels come first, then the consonants. The five vowels with macrons – Ā ā, Ē ē, Ī ī, Ō ō, Ū ū – are not treated as separate letters, but are alphabetized immediately after unaccented vowels. The okina is ignored for purposes of alphabetization, but is included as a consonant.

Pronunciation

The letter names were invented for Hawaiian specifically, since they do not follow traditional European letter names in most cases. The names of M, N, P, and possibly L were most likely derived from

Greek Greek may refer to: Greece Anything of, from, or related to Greece, a country in Southern Europe: *Greeks, an ethnic group. *Greek language, a branch of the Indo-European language family. **Proto-Greek language, the assumed last common ancestor ...

, and that for W from the deleted letter V.

Diphthongs

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Hawaiian Alphabet Hawaiian language Latin alphabets 1822 establishments in Hawaii