Nick Whyte has an interesting discussion of þorn, the old letter that signified the “th” sound. He also mentions eth (ð) which does a similar job (via the LibCon netcast). These are letters that are no longer used in English, but are retained in Icelandic and Faroese.
It reminds me of the ezett (ß), a German letter that replaces a double-s in some cases, like groß schloß for example.
What I want to know is this: Where do all these letters appear in their respective alphabets?
You could google it. That’s what I’d do.
I am increasingly finding that, for obscure questions such as this, a question on my blog yeilds a better answer.
This sort of question is not merely one of idle linguistics: it is a vital question for database work, particularly where records have to be indexed alphabetically so that they can be found quickly in the table. The “collation” specifies exactly how characters should be sorted – getting it wrong can have all sorts of horrid implications.
And can you tell me when we stopped using f for s ? I often see this on church tombs and always wonder?