It’s & - ampersand aka “and per se and”. The article also mentions these:
lost letters include thorn (þ) – a soft “th” sound – and Wynn (ƿ), which was replaced by “uu”, before this was superseded by “w”. Ethel (Œ) – pronounced like the “oi” in “oil” – has also been lost, in favor of using vowel combinations to get the same job done. Yogh (ȝ) was briefly a way to denote the “ch” sounds, as found at the end of “loch”, but was soon abandoned, and the specific sound it denotes rarely used in English anymore.
In that case also add ð. If you say the words “think” and “this” out loud, they use different “th”-sounds. “These” would be “ðese”, and “think” would be “þink”.
Wasn’t that a misconception and they both make either of those sounds?
In Old English, ⟨ð⟩ (called ðæt) was used interchangeably with ⟨þ⟩ to represent the Old English dental fricative phoneme /θ/ or its allophone /ð/, which exist in modern English phonology as the voiceless and voiced dental fricatives both now spelled ⟨th⟩.
Did Old English not have both voiced and voiceless dental fricatives? Modern German has neither θ nor ð, and Old English sharing so much it wouldn’t surprise me, but O.E. obviously acquired or inherited them somewhere - was the voiced distinction introduced later? Probably not from Latin, since it didn’t have those either.
It’s the same with the letter f, from what I remember it was pronounced as an f or a v, depending on what letters are before and after it, similar to lenition in Irish, or s being pronounced as both s and z in Romance languages depending on what’s around it.
þ and ð are digraphs. This means they represent the same sound, much like the modern ‘th’ can be voiced (in words like ‘this’ and ‘that’) or unvoiced (in words like ‘thick’ or ‘through’). The general rule of thumb is that þ comes at the start of a word and ð comes in the middle or at the end. However, you will often see them used interchangeably, with the same word appearing on the same page spelled with both ð forms and þ forms. You can even see words like ‘oþþe’ spelled ‘oþðe’ or ‘oððe’ so don’t overthink it.
Also, yogh looks too much like the Arabic numeral three, so it sort of makes sense why they got rid of it.
I believe Œ is still used in French (though it doesn’t count as part of the alphabet), but I just spell it as OE since it just looks so ugly. Æ looks way worse though, and Icelandic still uses it.
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