Dead letters

[supergee]

How wynn lost

Thanx to andrewducker

Comments

[weofodthignen]

Not a very good summary, I'm afraid. The æ history is complicated; the Latinate use does indeed survive in British English in recent loanwords, though it's being abandoned because keyboards don't accommodate it, but the Anglo-Saxon use is distinct. The "ye olde" y is from þ, not ð; Anglo-Saxon used them interchangeably. ð is a later development, from d in the lowercase, from Þ in the uppercase.

Now a real linguist will come along and tell me I've got something wrong :-)

M