English alphabet 24 letters of the Latin alphabet first (including ampersand), then 5 additional English letters, starting with the Tironian note "ond" (⁊), an insular symbol for "and": In the orthography of Modern English, thorn (þ), eth (ð), wynn (ƿ), yogh (), ash (æ), and ethel (œ) are obsolete. Latin borrowings reintroduced homographs of ash and ethel into Middle English and Early Modern English, though they are largely obsolete (see "Ligatures in recent usage" below), and where they are used they are not considered to be separate letters (e.g. for collation purposes), but rather ligatures. Thorn and eth were both replaced by
English orthography Many loanwords come from languages where the pronunciation of vowels corresponds to the way they were pronounced in Old English, which is similar to the Italian or Spanish pronunciation of the vowels, and is the value the vowel symbols and have in the International Phonetic Alphabet. As a result, there is a somewhat regular system of pronouncing "foreign" words in English, and some borrowed words have had their spelling changed to conform to this system. For example, "Hindu" used to be spelled "Hindoo", and the name "Maria" used to be pronounced like the name "Mariah", but was changed to conform