<P> Due to words with different meanings being spelled alike, use of the glottal stop became necessary . 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 ʻokina to distinguish ko ʻu (' my') from kou (' your'). It was not until 1864 that the ʻokina became a recognized letter of the Hawaiian alphabet . </P> <P> As early as 1821, one of the missionaries, Hiram Bingham, was using macrons in making handwritten transcriptions of Hawaiian vowels . The macron, or kahakō, was used to differentiate between short and long vowels . </P> <P> The current official Hawaiian alphabet consists of thirteen letters: five vowels (A a, E e, I i, O o, U u) and eight consonants (H h, K k, L l, M m, N n, P p, W w, ʻ). 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 ʻokina is ignored for purposes of alphabetization . </P> <P> 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 . </P>

How many hawaiian letters are in the alphabet