Ama of Papua New Guinea

"Why do you write i instead of e?" asked SIL linguist Britten Arsjo while teaching Amas to write their own language.

"It's hard to choose which letter," was the reply.

It was hard to choose because the alphabet had too many letters! The Arsjos had tentatively figured more phonemes than the language actually had, leading to an alphabet with 8 vowels.

But all people, even illiterates, have an intuitive feeling for the phonemes they use in speech.

This came out when Amas began to write their own language, and used only 4 vowels instead of 8.

The Arsjos noticed this, revised their phoneme analysis, and now the alphabet fits the feeling the people have for their own language.