According to this link, we are missing (in Modern English) at least three letters that used to be in common use in English. These are thorn, edh, and yogh.
Are there others that were clearly in the English alphabet at some point and then not in it, or would the others simply be short forms and things that exist in some documents but which are not clearly known as “another letter of the English alphabet”?
The link mentions that kids used to include ampersand in the recitation of their ABCs in English schools at some point, but let’s leave that aside for now, too.
Best Answer
Yes, quite a few, actually; how you count them I leave up to you.
The Wikipedia article on Old English Latin alphabet mentioned five extras:
Taking those last to first...
æsc, ash (Æ, æ)
As in several modern languages including Icelandic, the letter now known as ash, spelled æsc in Old English, was considered a letter in its own right, not merely a ligature between a and e. For example, consider the OE wrǽððu, for modern wrath; indeed the very first letter of Ænglisc itself was an ash, and the very first word of Beowulf has ash in it:
ðæt, eth (Ð, ð)
This letter is still used in Icelandic, where it represents the voiced interdental fricative heard twice in English thither. It disappeared from English around 1300.
þorn, thorn (Þ, þ)
Thorn lasted longer than eth, all the way up until Early Modern English. The title of the posting, "Ye olde...", is actually "þe olde". It was used in a lot of scribal abbreviations.
ƿynn, wynn (Ƿ, ƿ)
Another letter of the Old English alphabet which we no longer use is wynn, which did get used in non-runic Latin script. Here are three Unicode code points:
It was used in Old and some Middle English, but went away under French influence around 1300. Like thorn, it’s too confusable with P. Most transliterations of Old English manuscripts replace wynn with w so that it can be more easily read, but there is some resurgent resistence to this. The Ænglisc Ƿikipǣdia (Old English Wikipedia) uses wynn, as you can see in the second word.
Tironian et (⁊)
This old letter, still used in modern Irish, was from a form of shorthand said to have been invented by Cicero’s scribe Marcus Tullius Tiro. Unicode uses U+204A for it. It is a scribal abbreviation for et, just as & is. Byrhtferð listed both ⁊ and & as separate letters of the alphabet for numerological purposes.
Unicode has this to say about the two:
Not that unlike the other letters mentioned by Byrhtferð, Unicode considers these two code points to be punctuation.
yoȝ, yogh (Ȝ, ȝ)
This letter was not in Old English at all, but rather is from Middle English. Unicode 1.0 was confused about the difference between ezh and yogh, a distinction carefully maintained by the Oxford English Dictionary. Here are the current Unicode code points and names for these letters:
In its article on ezh, Wikipedia says:
The definitive treatise on the yogh–ezh confusion is this one by Michael Everson entitled “On the derivation of YOGH and EZH”.
Insular Letters
These are alternate ways of writing letters we no longer write in this fashion. The insular G is particularly distinctive, and when looking for a good uncial script/font, you should pay especial notice to whether it has been reproduced authentically. The insular S looked very much like an R, and the insular T was a C with an overbar.
Unlike other font variations, these letters are considered so distinct that Unicode assigns them their own distinctive code points. They do not casefold to their non-insular versions, nor do they normalize to such. However, the Unicode Collation Algorithm does sort them close to the more familiar forms. This is the same way it treats ð; therefore, d, ð, and ꝺ are distinct letters that all sort after C and before E in Unicode.
Insular forms are still standard when writing Irish or Scottish Gaelic, although no longer so in English.