ASCII is so bloated that it even has a ligature from a dead language.
English also used to have the letter thorne. It looks quite a lot like a Y or y and leads to the notion that "Ye olde shoppe" is NOT pronounced as "the old shop". Here the the would probably have a long e so "thee". Modern thornes look more like a d - see Icelandic for example. See wikipedia for the full run down.
I still see r written as a sort of squiggly mess rotated 45 degrees. Mostly by the generation before mine (I'm 53). A lowercase s used to be written looking like f with the crossbar missing.
I suspect the kids might have said: "et per se and" or "ut ..." and then that collapsed into "and per se and" -> ampers& (yes I have seen that monstrosity used in anger)!
When printing presses were imported from continental Europe, þey didn't have þis letter, so þe letter y was used as a substitute.
Eð is Ð/ð, which has ðe same sound. Ðorn derives from runes, eð from Roman script. Eð is still used in Icelandic and Faroese.
I ðink English would benefit from a few more letters, alðough ðis one isn't ðe most useful. Æ or Ø, or accents on vowels, would be more useful for spelling and pronunciation.
"Thomas" is ðe only word I can ðink of with a TH ðat wouldn't be a þorn.
It was actually an english letter (at least as recently as the late 19th Century), considered part of the alphabet; its current name being a corruption of the end of the alphabet recitation including it, “... and, per se and”.
If any word deserves a character, it’s “the.”
There are a bunch of old handwritten abbreviations that have fallen out of use probably due to typewriter/computer limitations.
But ðis might be because I have Danish as well as English installed, at at least Ð is required for Faroese names.
> In screenplays, two authors joined with & collaborated on the script, while two authors joined with and worked on the script at different times and may not have consulted each other at all.
I sometimes use it to avoid awkwardness in lists, e.g. "I ate fish & chips and drank a cup of tea".
I guess both examples use & as a stronger binder than and.
- ! from “Io”
- ? From “Quo”
- W from UU (or VV, back before U and V diverged)
- And German of course has the ß, ligature of soft s with s.
There is not really a clear delineation between when a ligature becomes a letter, at least before formal systems like ASCII required them.