text: Most long vowels in the katakana syllabary are written with a special bar symbol  (vertical in vertical writing), called a chōon, as in  mēkā "maker" instead of  meka "mecha". However, some long vowels are written with additional vowel characters, as with hiragana, with the distinction being orthographically significant.
  Some analyses make a distinction between a long vowel and a succession of two identical vowels, citing pairs such as  satōya 'sugar shop'  vs.  . They are usually identical in normal speech, but when enunciated a distinction may be made with a pause or a glottal stop inserted between two identical vowels.
  In transcription: tsuki  'moon' vs. tsūki  'airflow'.
  In the Korean Hangul alphabet, vowel length is not distinguished in normal writing. Some dictionaries use a double dot, , for example  "Daikon radish".
  In the Classic Maya script, also based on syllabic characters, long vowels in monosyllabic roots were generally written with word-final syllabic signs ending in the vowel -i rather than an echo-vowel. Hence, chaach "basket", with a long vowel, was written as cha-chi (compare chan "sky", with a short vowel, written as cha-na). If the nucleus of the syllable was itself i, however, the word-final vowel for indicating length was -a: tziik- "to count; to honour, to sanctify" was written as tzi-ka (compare sitz' "appetite", written as si-tz'i).