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.

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.

Early Middle Japanese sees a significant amount of Chinese influence on the language's phonology – length distinctions become phonemic for both consonants and vowels, and series of both labialised ( e. g. kwa ) and palatalised ( kya ) consonants are added.

A noteworthy example is the use of two prayers in Punic in Poenulus, spoken by the Carthaginian elder Hanno, which are significant to Semitic linguistics because they preserve the Carthaginian pronunciation of the vowels.

It enciphered vowels ( AEIOUY ) and consonants separately, perhaps to reduce telegram costs, and this was a significant weak point.

* A significant difference between the high and low variants is the pronunciation of ch after the front vowels ( i, e, ä, ö and ü ) and consonants.

The Greeks took letters which did not represent sounds that existed in Greek, and changed them to represent the vowels.

The phonetic structure of the Greek language created too many ambiguities when the vowels went unrepresented, so the script was modified.

Writing systems that indicate consonants but do not indicate most vowels ( like the Aramaic one ) or indicate them with added diacritical signs, have been called abjads by Peter T. Daniels to distinguish them from later alphabets, such as Greek, that represent vowels more systematically.

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

Even the best and relatively recent classical Greek and Latin dictionaries are still concerned with indicating only the length ( weight ) of syllables ; that is why most still do not indicate the length of vowels in syllables that are otherwise metrically determined.

Derived letters such as Ö and Ø have been created for the alphabets of some languages to distinguish values that were not present in Latin and Greek, particularly rounded front vowels.

The Septuagint is also useful for elucidating pre-Masoretic Hebrew: many proper nouns are spelled out with Greek vowels in the LXX, while contemporary Hebrew texts lacked vowel pointing.

Both the Latin and Greek terms sometimes referred to consonants in general, which ancient grammarians did not consider pronounceable on their own without vowels.

The first important advancement of the Greeks was the creation of the alphabet based on a system previously used by the Phoenicians, adding vowels and other consonants needed in Greek ( see Robins, 1997 ).

The metrical " feet " in the Greek was based on the length of time taken to pronounce each syllable, which were categorized according to their weight as either " long " syllables or " short " syllables ( also known as " heavy " and " light " syllables, respectively, to distinguish from long and short vowels ).

Adding vowels to the alphabet and dropping some consonants, the Greeks developed a script which included only what we know of as capital Greek letters.

The Greek alphabet ( and by extension its descendants such as the Latin, the Cyrillic and the Coptic ), was a direct successor of Phoenician, though certain letter values were changed to represent vowels.

What is today referred to as the Greek alphabet was originally the Phoenician alphabet borrowed to spell Greek words, with some originally Semitic consonantal letters – such as aleph ( Greek Alpha = A ), he ( Greek Epsilon = E ), and ' ayin ( Greek Omicron = O ) – used to represent Greek vowels.

With the introduction of letters representing vowels in the Greek alphabet, the need for inter-word separation became much less.

In Modern Greek, it has two distinct pronunciations: In front of high or front vowels ( or ) it is pronounced as a voiceless palatal fricative, as in German ich or like the h in some pronunciations of the English words hew and human.

In Phoenician, qoph was pronounced ; in Greek, which lacked such a sound, it was instead used for before back vowels, Ο, Υ and Ω.

The circumflex has its origins in the polytonic orthography of Ancient Greek, where it marked long vowels that were pronounced with high and then falling pitch.

A true alphabet has letters for the vowels of a language as well as the consonants.

The recently extinct Ubykh language had only 2 or 3 vowels but 84 consonants ; the Taa language has 87 consonants under one analysis, 164 under another, plus some 30 vowels and tone.

It is quite prone to considerable reduction and assimilation of both consonants and vowels even in very formal standard language.

Each unit is itself made up of syllables, the syllables being formed from consonants and vowels taken from a language known to the speaker:

As it is well known that Arabic language is written without vowels, and when Qur ' an reached the non Arabic speakers, people began having different dielects and phonics which was changing the exact meaning of verses in the Qur ' an.

Although the rules seem simple, it is hard to use classical hexameter in English, because English is a stress-timed language that condenses vowels and consonants between stressed syllables, while hexameter relies on the regular timing of the phonetic sounds.

Regional differences can be recognized by various factors: the openness of vowels, the length of the consonants, and influence of the local language ( for example, in informal situations the contraction annà replaces andare in the area of Rome for the infinitive " to go "; and nare is what Venetians say for the infinitive " to go ").

The Juǀʼhoan language has some 30 click consonants, not counting clusters, among perhaps 90 phonemes, which include strident and pharyngealized vowels and four tones.

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.

While which were these consonants and vowels remained mysterious, Ventris learned enough about the structure of the underlying language to begin guessing.

Since it did not have a writing system, when the Spanish conquistadors, when they arrived, wrote the language in their own alphabet without distinguishing long vowels.

Kasem, a language with a ten-vowel system employing ATR vowel harmony, has seven nasalized vowels.

However, the recently discovered language of Zialo has nasal equivalent for each of its seven vowels.

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.

The Dutch language however, makes a much greater difference in pronunciation between these vowels, and therefore the Dutch have difficulties hearing the difference between them in English pronunciation.

In Extremaduran and Fala language, some post-tonical vowels open in vocative forms of nouns, but it is a new development which doesn't come from the Latin vocative case.

The word vowel comes from the Latin word vocalis, meaning " speaking ", because The Taa language, spoken mainly in Botswana and Namibia, is extremely unusual in having ( depending on analysis ) between 20 and 31 vowels.

One of the most common vowels is ; it is nearly universal for a language to have at least one open vowel, though most dialects of English have an and a — and often an, all open vowels — but no central.