Some vowels and consonants were difficult to distinguish. Many languages show contrasts between long and short vowels and consonants. The length of vowels and consonants is not notated. Stress affects the length of both vowels and consonants. Syllables using long vowels are always stressed. Vowels alliterate with any other vowel, as with and . This particular writing system was composed of symbols representing three vowels and 14 consonants. Standard Albanian has 7 vowels and 29 consonants. Lojban has 6 vowels and 17 consonants. These are some examples of combining a consonant with different vowels. Some unstressed short vowels have been elided. English dialects differ greatly in their pronunciation of open vowels. Hawaiian has five short and five long vowels, plus diphthongs. Kazakh has a system of 12 phonemic vowels, 3 of which are diphthongs. All unstressed vowels (except /a/) disappeared.