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.

Syriac-Aramaic vowels are classified into three groups: the Alap (), the waw (), and the yod ().

From greatest to least stricture, speech sounds may be classified along a cline as stop consonants ( with occlusion, or blocked airflow ), fricative consonants ( with partially blocked and therefore strongly turbulent airflow ), approximants ( with only slight turbulence ), and vowels ( with full unimpeded airflow ).

The American linguist Kenneth Pike ( 1943 ) suggested the terms ' vocoid ' for a phonetic vowel and " vowel " for a phonological vowel, so using this terminology, and are classified as vocoids but not vowels.

It has been classified as an abjad because it records only consonantal sounds, with the addition of matres lectionis for some vowels.

Shorthand systems can also be classified according to the way that vowels are represented.

Similarly, stressed and unstressed high-front-peripheral vowels ( FLEECE, HAPPY ) are classified together as ( unlike in older RP ( cultivated Southern British ), where HAPPY ends with the vowel in KIT ).

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 ).

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.

* Diaeresis ( linguistics ) or Hiatus, two adjacent vowels, in adjacent syllables, not separated by a consonant or pause and not merged into a diphthong

It is verbal behavior that consists of using a certain number of consonants and vowels [...] in a limited number of syllables that in turn are organized into larger units that are taken apart and rearranged pseudogrammatically [...] with variations in pitch, volume, speed and intensity.

Also, under influence from orthography of European languages, transliterating of borrowed words into Arabic is usually done using vowels in place of diacritics, even when the latter is more suitable, and even when transliterating words from another Semitic language, such as Hebrew, a phenomenon augmented by the neglect of diacritics in most printed forms since the beginning of mechanical printing.

Old Turkic being a synharmonic language, a number of consonant signs are divided into two " synharmonic sets ", one for front vowels and the other for back vowels.

These occurred as allophones of the vowels before nasal consonants and in places where a nasal had followed it in an older form of the word, before it was absorbed into a neighboring sound.

Here the vowels are the same, but the consonants, although both palatalized, do not fall into the same class in the bardic rhyming scheme.

Native grammarians classify Tamil phonemes into vowels, consonants, and a " secondary character ", the āytam.

The filters were controlled by a set of keys and a foot pedal to convert the hisses and tones into vowels, consonants, and inflections.

The sounds ( spelled with ‹ V ›) and ( spelled ‹ B ›) of Classical Latin developed into a bilabial fricative between vowels in Early Medieval Latin.

Developers can also now set switches in to code to cause the algorithm to encode Metaphone keys 1 ) taking non-initial vowels into account, as well as 2 ) encoding voiced and unvoiced consonants differently.

# The merging of " majhul " vowels " ē " / " ī " and " ō " / " ū " into " ī " and " ū " respectively in Iranian Persian, whereas in Afghan Persian, they are still kept separate.

The system works by converting numbers into consonant sounds, then into words by adding vowels.

This phenomenon preserves the recoverability of the phoneme in " writer " despite the North American English process of flapping, which merges and into before unstressed vowels.

However, according to the Royal Academy of the Basque Language, the origin may be another: The name is first found on Muslim chronicles of the 8th century referring to the Alavese Plains ( Spanish Llanada Alavesa, Basque Arabako Lautada ), laua in old Basque ( currently lautada ) with the Arab article added ( al + laua ), developing into Spanish Álava and Basque Araba ( a typical development of l to r between vowels ).

* Development of proto-Slavic ě, e, ę into a, o, ǫ before hard consonants ( or other similar differentiations of these vowels depending on dialect ).

The split of into before * i and before all other reconstructed vowels, which is found in Mongolia but not in Inner Mongolia, is often cited as a fundamental distinction, for example Proto-Mongolic, Khalkha, Chakhar ' year ' versus Proto-Mongolic, Khalkha, Chakhar ' few '.

* Like in other languages of Sardinia,,, and may merge into mid vowels and, respectively.

The short vowels, consisting only of monophthongs, correspond to the RP lax vowels.

There exist pairs of long and short vowels with overlapping vowel quality giving Australian English phonemic length distinction, which is unusual amongst the various dialects of English, though not unknown elsewhere, such as in regional south-eastern dialects of the UK and eastern seaboard dialects in the US .< ref >

They indicate the presence of short vowels or their absence

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.

Iota participated as the second element in falling diphthongs, with both long and short vowels as the first element.

Japanese has five vowels, and vowel length is phonemic, with each having both a short and a long version.

In some words in Hebrew there is a choice of whether to use a mater lectionis or not, and in modern printed texts matres lectionis are sometimes used even for short vowels, which is considered to be grammatically incorrect, though instances are found as far back as Talmudic times.

This corresponds to vowel length, by contrast with the short vowels ε ( epsilon ) and ο ( omicron ), which are transliterated as plain e and o.

Over a century later, in 1645, Horacio Carochi defined macrons to mark long vowels ā, ē, ī and ō, and short vowels with grave (`) accents.

A more systematic example is that of abjads like the Arabic and Hebrew alphabets, in which the short vowels are normally left unwritten and have to be inferred by the reader.

Note the intersection of the two circles — the distinction between short a, i and u is made by both speakers, but Arabic lacks the mid articulation of short vowels, while Hebrew lacks the distinction of vowel length.

* The Latin short vowels and have preserved their original sound ( in Italian, Spanish and Portuguese they became and, respectively.

Vowel length is indicated by a macron ( ā ) or a breve ( ă ) for long and short vowels, respectively.

Unlike more common systems for transliterating Arabic, SATTS does not provide the reader with any more phonetic information than standard Arabic orthography does ; that is, it provides the bare Arabic alphabetic spelling with no notation of short vowels, doubled consonants, etc.

The long vowels are about twice as long as the short vowels.

The diphthongs are usually pronounced about 1. 5 times as long as the short vowels, though most grammatical texts place them with the long vowels.

It is not uncommon for short grammatical words to consist of only vowels, such as a and I in English.

* There is no contrast between the vowels of caught and cot ( cot – caught merger, as above ); in addition, the short a of bat is more open than almost everywhere else in North America.