the 15th century. The first bilingual renderings of religious texts are those by Étienne de Flacourt, who also published the first dictionary of the language. Radama I, the first literate representative of the Merina monarchy, though extensively versed in the Arabico-Malagasy tradition, opted in 1823 for a Latin system derived by David Jones and invited the Protestant London Missionary Society to establish schools and churches. The first book to be printed in Malagasy using Latin characters was the Bible, which was translated into Malagasy in 1835 by British Protestant missionaries working in the highlands area of Madagascar. The current Malagasy alphabet consists of 21 letters: a, b, d, e, f, g, h, i, j, k, l, m, n, o, p, r, s, t, v, y, z. The orthography maps rather straightforwardly to the phonemic inventory. The letters i and y both represent the sound (y is used word-finally, and i elsewhere), while o is pronounced . The affricates and are written tr and dr, respectively, while and are written ts and j. The letter h is often silent. All other letters have essentially their IPA values. The letters c, q, u, w and x are all not used in native Malagasy words. Mp and occasionally nt may begin a word, but they are pronounced . @ is used informally as a short form for amin'ny, which is a preposition followed by the definite form, meaning for instance with the. Diacritics Diacritics are not obligatory in standard Malagasy, except in the case where its absence leads to an ambiguity: tanàna ("city") must have the diacritic to discriminate itself from tanana ("hand"). They may however be used in the following ways: ◌̀ (grave accent) shows the stressed syllable in a word. It is frequently used for disambiguation. For instance in tanàna (town) and tanana (hand), where the word that is an exception to the usual pronunciation rules (tanàna) gets an accent. Using the accent on the word that follows the pronunciation rules (tànana) is less common, mainly in dictionaries. (This is very similar to the usage of the grave accent in Italian.) ◌́ (acute accent) may be used in very old dictionaries, along with grave accent dialects such as Bara French (Tuléar) and French-spelled (Antsirabé) names. Malagasy versions are Toliara or Toliary and Antsirabe. ◌̂ (circumflex) is used as follows: ô shows that the letter is pronounced and not , in Malagasified