<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 (Aa, Ee, Ii, Oo, Uu) and eight consonants (Hh, Kk, Ll, Mm, Nn, Pp, Ww, ʻokina). Alphabetic order differs from the normal Latin order in that the vowels come first, then the consonants . The five vowels with macrons--Āā, Ēē, Īī, Ōō, Ūū--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 letters are in the hawaii alphabet