Also, ß is ss and since words don't start with Ss there is no need for an uppercase ß. When whole words are capitalized ß turns into SS.
Of course there is a little edge case where capitalization isn't reversible. For example, is the capitalized version of the name MASSMANN to be converted to Maßmann or Massmann? That is in my opinion the only reason the uppercase ß was added to Unicode. To resolve this ambiguity. It has no place in proper German typography.
Like all things I don’t understand, I suspect fashion was heavily involved when the decision was made.
The Dutch keyboard layout is effectively US international. There are no special characters that that keyboard supports; including all the accents/modifiers we inherited from French, German, etc. Spelling without those is now correct.
This is something that has evolved over the last decades. In the eighties, people would memorize the character codes to produce letters with those. I remember having a card with the right key combinations for word perfect. This is not a thing anymore. People just skip it and the grammar and spelling rules were actually modified to not require these anymore in most situations.
Funnily enough, the Y, is not commonly used in Dutch and usually referred to as the Greek IJ but pronounced the same way.
Old English had four letters that are not in today's US-ASCII, two of which are borrowed from a runic alphabet rather than created by modifying Latin letters.
It's also a bit arbitrary whether a modified Latin letter is regarded as a new character or an existing character modified by a diacritic: take Ø, for example. And there are characters like Æ. And never forget what Turkish did: add dotless i so that ordinary i could then be regarded as dotless i plus a diacritic (though of course it isn't usually regarded that way).
My guess is that the educated people of the time were very familiar with Greek, so it was easier for them to work with Greek letters rather than the newly invented ones. It probably was the same for Latin-based scripts as well.
The script that came to be known as Cyrilic was developed by Cyril and Methodius' followers, after they were exiled from Great Moravia (by the bishop that replaced Methodius), so it's safe to assume that those in that group were not Bulgarians either.
The original Latin alphabet had 21 letters. Then G has replaced Z, without changing the number of letters. Then, by the time of the Empire, Y and Z have been added at the end (the same Z that had been removed earlier, while Y had the same origin as V, but by this time it had acquired a distinct pronunciation in Greek).
Then the Latin alphabet had 23 letters for more than 1000 years.
It has grown to 26 letters during the Middle Ages, with the addition of J, U and W ("u" was originally the small letter form of "V"; distinct letters U and V have been created by making a capital "U" and a small "v").
Not sure where J came from.
One question is why we borrowed K when we already had C. In modern English, C is more or less a completely superfluous letter, adding unnecessary complexity to pronunciation. Seeing my son try to pronounce "cycle" is one of many examples.
J was introduced because I had a similar problem, except I could be either a consonant or a vowel, rather than any of two consonants. The same applied to the introduction of U for V. Well, almost the same. In the case of I, they added J to be the consonant, while in the case of V, they added U to be the vowel.
Finally, people changed the pronunciation of V over time to be something new, and W was introduced to be the original sound in English. W does not exist in Latin since V fulfills its role, unless you are using a modern pronunciation that changes how V is pronounced and then you still do not need W. There were other sound changes (see Italian), but this is sufficient to explain all of the letters. Well, there is also Z, which they removed from early Latin and later reintroduced to represent a Greek sound.
The original Latin alphabet had 21 letters:
ABCDE FZHIK LMNOP QRSTV X
The letter V (Greek u-psilon) was used to write the sound U, both as vowel and as consonant (i.e. like English W).
The letter F (Greek di-gamma) was used in Greek for consonant U (English W), but in Latin it was used to write the sound F, also a labial consonant, which did not exist in Greek.
In Latin, in the beginning 3 different letters were used to write the sound K, C before E or I, K before A and Q before O or U. So K belonged to the Latin alphabet since its very beginning.
Later, the rules for writing K have been simplified, so it was always written as C, except before a V (i.e. U sound) that was consonant, not vowel, i.e. like English W. Writing K has been retained only in a few traditional expressions, e.g. in "KALENDAE", which was used when writing dates.
Initially, the letter C (Greek gamma) was used both for the sound K and for the sound G. Later, the letter G has been created, by modifying the letter C. Since then, G was used for the sound G, except in a few traditional expressions, e.g. the name "Gaius" has continued to be written as "Caius", together with a few other traditional names.
The new letter G has substituted in the Latin alphabet the letter Z (Greek zeta), which was not used in Latin. Therefore the 21-letter Latin alphabet has become:
ABCDE FGHIK LMNOP QRSTV X
Several centuries later, during the Roman Empire, 2 additional Greek letters have been added at the end of the alphabet, so the 23-letter Latin alphabet was:
ABCDE FGHIK LMNOP QRSTV XYZ
The letter Z was reintroduced, but not in its original place, because it was contained in some borrowed Greek words. The same with Y. While both V and Y come from Greek u-psilon, by the time when Y has been added to the Latin alphabet it was pronounced as a vowel different from both Latin V and I, i.e. as a front rounded closed vowel, like the Scandinavian Y, German Ü (U with Umlaut) or French U.
The 23-letter Latin alphabet has become a 26-letter alphabet more than a millennium later, when the letters J, U and W have been added (J and U were required because in the Romance languages the old I consonant and U consonant had become fricative sounds, completely distinct from the I and U vowels, while W has been initially added for English, which is one of the few Indo-European languages that has retained the original pronunciation of consonant U).
Note also that the letter 'Y' is explicitly named 'Greek I' [literal translation] in Latin-descended languages; and then other languages borrowed that name (from the French).
It's not called that in English, of course, but English isn't a Latin-descended language.
Interestingly, the same is not true for 'Z', which is a more direct 'zed' (or 'zet', not like 'd' and 't' are that different) in most (all?) European languages, including the Germanic ones.
"W" was added originally by northern Germanic languages, including English, replacing the practice of writing the same sound with a doubled "u" or "v". Which explains both its appearance and its name in English and many other languages.
- The use of digraphs is frequently due to historical sound changes; first, certain sound combinations changed valence, but others do not. Then one rewrites with the digraphs with the other instances by analogy. Sometimes it comes from borrowing; for example the historical use of "ch" to denote the historic greek "chi", or aspirated chi sound, as in "chronograph"
- Finally, it is easier to modify a existing type, or arrange movable type, to include an accent rather than to create one from scratch.
As I understand (in a simplified way), every once in a while (once in a few centuries) there's a major language reform to make written form reflect current pronunciation as much as possible, but already in 100—200 years people would start asking "why do we write not like we pronounce", until some political movement decides reforming orthography would promote their agenda. Then the cycle continues.
In space as well. Local accents can be quite variable. This alone dooms any “we should write words as we pronounce them” to fail unless every region has its own orthographic rules, which would be honestly terrible.
English doesn’t. Bernard Shaw tried inventing new letters. I guess that changing the English alphabet os a slippery slope. If you make it as phonetic as the Latin script is meant to be, and with special characters, people would have to relearn how to read from scratch
Color and colour are different pictures of the same word.
There are other phonological differences between English dialects, but for the most part you can notate them as sounds that merely some dialects don't distinguish (e.g., nonrhotic dialects dropping the `r' sound).
In Swedish dictionaries those letters are added to the end of the alphabet - it's surprisingly hard to internalise that and remember to look up Å words at the end of the dictionary and not the front...
Edit: tokai below says Å was AA originally not AO so I (unsurprisingly) stand corrected: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44317851
Which, incidentally, is missing in TFA. Funny how thoroughly the Nazis managed to erase that piece of German legacy (and the only modern Latin-script cursive distinct not coming from the familliar Irish>Italian lineage).
Completely off-topic, why the hell does Hangul's G look like a backwards Gamma? Is that coincidence, there's no way that was borrowed from the other side of the planet.
(With the one for sh, ш, having been borrowed from the Hebrew for sh/s/th, ש.)
And yet there have been some ligatures converted into letters following sound changes, as in ЪІ > Ы for [ɨ] (in Russian and Belarusian) or ІО > Ю for [ʉ] (in Bulgarian, Russian, Ukrainian, and Belarusian).
English doesn't? Explain "w".
Some names today still use the double a, like the Norwegian football player Martin Ødegaard. In that case it is pronounced the same as the "å" sound. (not too far from how an American might pronounce the "o" sound in "for")
While some script are deliberately designed, most are a result of gradual evolution.
Additionally, it counts modern font inventions as variants of the Latin Alphabet (a somewhat strange but acceptable interpretation) but then proceeds to not show its variants, despite the historic glyphs being shown in multiple variants each.
I find it lacking.
Even though I know almost nothing at all about the subject of medieval palaeography in Western Europe, I did read recently the write-downs of a Italian conference focused on the subject of palaeography in the Italian Middle Ages, and that is how I learned about stuff like La minuscola cancelleresca and La mercantesca. A link (in Italian, google translate can help) [1] about these two styles of writing and how they were formed:
> la MINUSCOLA CANCELLERESCA, usata dai notai e dalla classe colta non universitaria, e la MERCANTESCA, scrittura professionale dei mercanti, usata anche per testi letterari (ma solo in lingua volgare).
via google translate
> the MINUSCULE CANCELLERESCA, used by notaries and the non-university educated class, and the MERCANTESCA, the professional writing of merchants, also used for literary texts (but only in the vernacular).
[1] https://spotlight.vatlib.it/it/latin-paleography/feature/17-...
https://old.reddit.com/r/latin/comments/c0eeqi/colorized_cha...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English-language_spelling_refo...
* https://anseki.github.io/leader-line/
* https://barba.js.org/docs/getstarted/intro/
[1]: https://uclab.fh-potsdam.de/arete/assets/js/application.js
Latin had a very regular orthography: with the exceptions of I/J and U/V, and digraphs used to transliterate Greek, all letters had exactly one pronunciation. The distinctions between I and J, and between U and V, are mediaeval innovations to aid literacy.