I thought this would be about Old→Middle→Modern English, in which case the lost letters are Ƿ, ð, þ and æ.<p><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Middle_English#Alphabet" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Middle_English#Alphabet</a>
"It would have been confusing to say “X, Y, Z, and.” So, the students said, “and per se and.” Per se means “by itself,” so the students were essentially saying, “X, Y, Z, and by itself and.” The term per se was used to denote letters that also doubled as words, such as the letter I (for “me”) and A. By saying “per se,” you clarified that you meant the symbol and not the word.<p>Over time, “and per se and” was slurred together into the word we use today: ampersand."
"&" wasn't ever in the alphabet in the same capacity as the letters that represent sounds. It was there as a keyword signifying the end of the list. Then its name was expanded to clarify that it was not a normal letter but a keyword. Then that expanded name was misinterpreted by people who never needed the list termination signifier to begin with.<p>Lesson? KISS. They should've implemented it with brackets.
When I was very young, I remember AE being used in various printed materials (school books).<p><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C3%86" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C3%86</a><p>But by the time I was in High School it seemed to have disappeared.
I naively thought to be "part of the alphabet" our ancestors would have needed to, you know, use "&" in words - the article weakly hints at this for "&c" as being equivalent to "etc" (saving keystrokes even before they had keyboards, I guess). But given that they didn't, say, write "sand" as "s&" I will politely refuse to accept it as a letter.
I always thought <i>amper</i> was another word for merchant because in my native German the & symbol is called <i>"Kaufmanns-Und"</i>, literally "<i>merchants-and"</i>.
In the early 1970's, I saw the & appear in some of our older alphabet books. The absolutist child in me tried to work out if that bit of archaic data was authoritative or not.<p>Those books were likely printed in the 1950s.
Never would I have thought that "&" was ever part of an alphabet. It's more of a symbol, like "." or ";". HN is sometimes a source of curious things.
I was hoping this article would be about the letter C and be from the future.<p>The letter C is useless. It either makes the sound that S does or the sound K does. Instead of C we should just use an S or a K for every place a C is.<p>Some may argue that without C we wouldn't have CH. And then I say, "Why do we need two characters to represent a single sound? It should have it's own letter."<p>Alas, English spelling is all kinds of messed up. And I'll have to resign myself to that fact.
I keep saying that, by chance, it's a pity that the English alphabet has exactly 23 letters and doesn't have a single one more. Had it one more letter, say "ñ" or "ç" or some other, that'd make it perfect for base64: 24*2 + 10 = 64. Instead now we have 62 "base" alphanumeric alphabet, and two symbols that are disagreed upon since they have to be chosen depending on the context.
The alternate question is "why are these 26 characters the American English alphabet?" It's fairly arbitrary, a collection of historical accidents and changes in orthography.<p>And it's incomplete. You can't really write American English with just the usual 26 letters. Ñ and the ʻokina are proper letters and necessary for writing a bunch of American words correctly. The various kahakō are helpful too but they are treated as diacritics and not full fledged separate letters.
I was expecting this would be about the letter Ⱶ or one of the other Claudian letters of the Latin alphabet: <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Claudian_letters" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Claudian_letters</a>
In the early 1800s, school children reciting their ABCs concluded the alphabet with the &.<p>It would have been confusing to say “X, Y, Z, and.” So, the students said, “and per se and.” Per se means “by itself,” so the students were essentially saying, “X, Y, Z, and by itself and.”<p>So it was just some shorthand tossed in there
OP says 'per se' means 'by itself'. But in this case (the alphabet song) it makes more sense for 'per se' to have it's other meaning: 'as such'. That is, the letter means the same as 'and'.
Q: What character was removed from the alphabet?<p>A:<p><pre><code> 1> (diff (range #\a #\z) "the alphabet")
(#\c #\d #\f #\g #\i #\j #\k #\m #\n #\o #\q #\r #\s #\u #\v #\w
#\x #\y #\z)
</code></pre>
Plus all all non-alphabetic characters other than space.
Related from 2022: <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32249465">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32249465</a> ("The History of ‘Ampersand’ (2020)", 178 comments)
The Story of Ampersand, in The Phantom Tollbooth universe.<p><a href="https://sharegpt.com/c/J1U3T7m" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://sharegpt.com/c/J1U3T7m</a>