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
Phoenician alphabet corrupt Egyptian. This latter notion is reminiscent of the eventual discovery that the proto-Sinaitic alphabet was inspired by the model of hieroglyphs. The Phoenician letter forms shown here are idealized: actual Phoenician writing was cruder and more variable in appearance. There were also significant variations in Phoenician letter forms by era and region. When alphabetic writing began in Greece, the letter forms used were similar but not identical to the Phoenician ones and vowels were added because the Phoenician alphabet did not contain any vowels. There were also distinct variants of the writing system in different parts of Greece, primarily