Origins
In 1778, British explorer James Cook made the first reported European 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 AmericanOkina
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, and that for W from the deleted letter V.Diphthongs
See also
* Hawaiian BrailleReferences
{{DEFAULTSORT:Hawaiian Alphabet Hawaiian language Latin alphabets 1822 establishments in Hawaii