In other types of alphabet either the vowels are not indicated at all, as was the case in the Phoenician alphabet ( such systems are known as abjads ), or else the vowels are shown by diacritics or modification of consonants, as in the devanagari used in India and Nepal ( these systems are known as abugidas or alphasyllabaries ).

Note that the scripts mentioned above are not considered proper alphabets, as they all lack characters representing vowels.

The vowels are significant in the Greek language, and the syllabical Linear B script which was used by the Mycenaean Greeks from the 16th century BC had 87 symbols including 5 vowels.

These three differ from each other in the way they treat vowels: abjads have letters for consonants and leave most vowels unexpressed ; abugidas are also consonant-based, but indicate vowels with diacritics to or a systematic graphic modification of the consonants.

In alphabets in the narrow sense, on the other hand, consonants and vowels are written as independent letters.

( These are the only time vowels are indicated.

However, in Kurdish, writing the vowels is mandatory, and full letters are used, so the script is a true alphabet.

Such scripts are to tone what abjads are to vowels.

Most commonly, tones are indicated with diacritics, the way vowels are treated in abugidas.

In the Pollard script, an abugida, vowels are indicated by diacritics, but the placement of the diacritic relative to the consonant is modified to indicate the tone.

In Spanish, ñ is considered a separate letter, but accented vowels such as á and é are not.

French, with its silent letters and its heavy use of nasal vowels and elision, may seem to lack much correspondence between spelling and pronunciation, but its rules on pronunciation, though complex, are actually consistent and predictable with a fair degree of accuracy.

However, it has not incorporated the general Eastern umlaut of all synchronic or even historic " ya " sounds into " e " before front vowels – e. g. поляна ( polyana ) vs полени ( poleni ) " meadow – meadows " or even жаба ( zhaba ) vs жеби ( zhebi ) " frog – frogs ", even though it co-occurs with the yat alternation in almost all Eastern dialects that have it ( except a few dialects along the yat border, e. g. in the Pleven region ).

Until 1945, Bulgarian orthography did not reveal this alternation and used the original Old Slavic Cyrillic letter yat (), which was commonly called двойно е ( dvoyno e ) at the time, to express the historical yat vowel or at least root vowels displaying the ya – e alternation.

A breathy-voiced phonation ( not actually a fricative, as a literal reading of the IPA chart would suggest ) can sometimes be heard as an allophone of English between vowels, e. g. in the word behind, for some speakers.

Due to the limited number of runes, some runes were used for a range of phonemes, such as the rune for the vowel u which was also used for the vowels o, ø and y, and the rune for i which was also used for e.

In Spanish, the grapheme ñ is considered a new letter different from n and collated between n and o, as it denotes a different sound from that of a plain n. But the accented vowels á, é, í, ó, ú are not separated from the unaccented vowels a, e, i, o, u, as the acute accent in Spanish only modifies stress within the word or denotes a distinction between homonyms, and does not modify the sound of a letter.

:* Welsh uses the circumflex, diaeresis, acute and grave accents on its seven vowels a, e, i, o, u, w, y.

Both long and short forms of the vowels are listed separately in the Hungarian alphabet but members of the pairs a / á, e / é, i / í, o / ó, ö / ő, u / ú and ü / ű are collated in dictionaries as the same letter.

* Galician vowels can bear an acute accent ( á, é, í, ó, ú ) to indicate stress or difference between two otherwise same written words ( é, '( he / she ) is ' vs. e, ' and '), but trema is only used with ï and ü to show diaeresis in pronunciation.

* Welsh uses the circumflex, diaeresis, acute and grave accents on its seven vowels a, e, i, o, u, w, y.

Lip-rounding is also built into the system, so that front vowels ( such as e, a ) have spread or neutral lip postures, but the back vowels ( such as ) have more marked lip-rounding as vowel height increases.

Pallottino regarded this variation in vowels as " instability in the quality of vowels " and accounted for the second phase ( e. g. Herecele ) as " vowel harmony, i. e., of the assimilation of vowels in neighboring syllables ...."

The deletion of historical final schwas ( weak vowels ) at the end of words such as give and have phonemicized / v /, but the now-silent ⟨ e ⟩ remained at the end of most / v /- final words.

Some of the letters are represented by iconic shapes, such as b, c, d, k, and, in British Sign Language and the BANZSL group of languages, the vowels a, e, i, o, and u, are represented by pointing to the fingertips.

Another common strategy is to guess vowels first, as English only has five vowels ( a, e, i, o and u ), and almost every word has at least one.

During the time of post-classical Koiné Greek, the sound represented by eta was raised and merged with several other formerly distinct vowels ( iotacism ).

At this time ⟨ k ⟩ had fallen out of favor, and ⟨ c ⟩, which had formerly represented both and before open vowels, had come to express in all environments.

# In the northern and western ( formerly German ) regions where Poles from the territories annexed by the Soviet Union resettled after World War II, the older generation speaks a dialect of Polish characteristic of the Eastern Borderlands which resembles Ukrainian or Rusyn — especially in the " longer " pronunciation of vowels.

In the phonological history of the English language, vowels followed ( or formerly followed ) by the phoneme have undergone a number of phonological changes.

Many vowels are pronounced ( and were formerly spelt ) differently in Peninsular Malaysia: tujuh is pronounced ( and was spelt ) tujoh, pilih as pileh, etc., and many final as tend to be pronounced as schwas.

The acute marks the quality of the vowels é ( as opposed to è ), and ó ( as opposed to ò ).

The acute marks the quality of the vowels é ( as opposed to è ), ó ( as opposed to ò ) and á ( as opposed to à ).

# < span id =" n-pinyin ">↑↑↑↑</ span > Pinyin has four tone markers that can go on top of the any of the six vowels ( a, e, i, o, u, ü ); e. g.: macron ( ā, ē, ī, ō, ū, ǖ ), acute accent ( á, é, í, ó, ú, ǘ ), caron ( ǎ, ě, ǐ, ǒ, ǔ, ǚ ), grave accent ( à, è, ì, ò, ù, ǜ ).

# < span id =" n-vi ">↑↑↑↑</ span > Vietnamese has five tone markers that can go on top ( or below ) any of the 12 vowels ( a, ă, â, e, ê, i, o, ô, ơ, u, ư, y ); e. g.: grave accent ( à, ằ, ầ, è, ề, ì, ò, ồ, ờ, ù, ừ, ỳ ), hook above ( ả, ẳ, ẩ, ẻ, ể, ỉ, ỏ, ổ, ở, ủ, ử, ỷ ), tilde ( ã, ẵ, ẫ, ẽ, ễ, ĩ, õ, ỗ, ỡ, ũ, ữ, ỹ ), acute accent ( á, ắ, ấ, é, ế, í, ó, ố, ớ, ú, ứ, ý ), and dot below ( ạ, ặ, ậ, ẹ, ệ, ị, ọ, ộ, ợ, ụ, ự, ỵ ).

* So-called " metaphony " is very common, affecting original open stressed è and ò when followed by / i / or sometimes / o / ( operating before final vowels were dropped ).

The Old Testament is called by the Jews the Tanakh, an acronym formed by combining the initials of the three sections by which the Jews divide the text: the Torah, or Law ( the Pentateuch ), the Nevi ' im, or Prophets, and the Ketuvim, or Writings or Hagiographa ( with vowels added, as Hebrew is written with a consonantal script, TaNaKh ).

This description does not apply to some human languages, such as the Salishan languages, in which stops sometimes occur without vowels ( see Nuxálk ), and the modern conception of consonant does not require cooccurrence with vowels.

Consonants and vowels correspond to distinct parts of a syllable: The most sonorous part of the syllable ( that is, the part that's easiest to sing ), called the syllabic peak or nucleus, is typically a vowel, while the less sonorous margins ( called the onset and coda ) are typically consonants.

In Czech, as in Slovak, Bosnian, Croatian and Serbian, there are many words that do not have vowels: zmrzl ( frozen solid ), ztvrdl ( hardened ), scvrkl ( shrunk ), čtvrthrst ( quarter-handful ), blb ( dimwit ), vlk ( wolf ), or smrt ( death ).

The vowel inventory, or collection of phonemic vowels ( and the major allophones ), transcribed in IPA symbols, is:

:* Turkish uses a G with a breve ( Ğ ), two letters with an umlaut ( Ö and Ü, representing two rounded front vowels ), two letters with a cedilla ( Ç and Ş, representing the affricate and the fricative ), and also possesses a dotted capital İ ( and a dotless lowercase ı representing a high unrounded back vowel ).

* Vietnamese uses the acute accent ( dấu sắc ), the grave accent ( dấu huyền ), the tilde ( dấu ngã ), the dot below ( dấu nặng ) and the hook above ( dấu hỏi ) on vowels as tone indicators.

This includes several letters with diacritical markings, such as horizontal lines above vowels ( ā, ī, ū ), dots above and below consonants () as well as a few others ( ś, ñ ).

* For vowels as an independent syllable ( in writing, unattached to a consonant ), either at the beginning of a word or ( in Hindi ) after another vowel, there are full-letter forms.

* Diaeresis ( prosody ), pronunciation of vowels in a diphthong separately, or the division made in a line of poetry when the end of a foot coincides with the end of a word

The derivation must then have been secondary for the initial ayin to be confused with an aleph ( both represented by vowels in Akkadian ), and the second consonant descended as a / s / ( like in the Aramaic asthr " bright star "), rather than a / sh / as in Hebrew and most commonly in Akkadian.