https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swedish_alphabet#Uncommon_lett...

(Finland is bilingual, and the characters sets, keyboards and sorting rules are same both for Finnish and Swedish.)

In Arabic, oo and v are both bilabial sounds (produced using both lips). In Persian, v is pronounced more labio-dentally (bottom lip, top teeth), which is perhaps what causes the confusion.

But the lack of written distinction for these sounds is common in many scripts including Indian, Greek, and older Latin.

> Our father whiche art in heuen,

> halowed be thy name.

> Let thy kyngdome cum vnto vs.

> Thy wyll be fulfylled as well in erthe,

> as it is in heuen.

In the first line we see how U was used within words for both U and V ('our' and 'heaven'). In the third line we see how V was used for words starting with U (as well as words starting with V).

Of course, this isn't universal, there are counter-examples of U used initially and V used medially!

Another weird gray area between ligature and letter are the "æ" and "œ" characters, which are mainly used as ligatures for the British spellings of "foetus" and "encyclopaedia" but were, at some times, seen as actual letters. American spelling reforms erased this particular weirdness from our dialect.

Ðere was also ðe letter "ðæt" ("that"), a later invention ðat began as a stylistic alternative to þorn in Old English manuscripts, but fell out of favour early in þe Middle English period (during þe 1200s or so).

Þorn continued to be used to a limited extent in early printed works of English. The <th> digraph started to supplant it already in manuscripts during the Middle English period, with <þ> being retained only in limited contexts well before the introduction of the press in Europe (contexts being primarily common sigla (scribal abbreviations) like <þᵉ> for "the" and <þᵗ> for "that", and occasionally when the scribe felt like they might run out of room on the line).

See some previous discussion here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16059265

I'm having trouble parsing this. What was the meaning of this phrase?

A mondegreen of "and per se and", meaning "and (the character) '&' by itself", which is how the symbol (&) was originally referred to in English. This formulation is due to the fact that in schools, when reciting the alphabet, any letter that could also be used as a word in itself ("A," "I," "O" and, at one point, "&") was preceded by the Latin expression per se (Latin for "by itself"). Also, it was common practice to add at the end of the alphabet the "&" sign, pronounced "and". Thus the end of the recitation would be: "X, Y, Z and per se and." This last phrase was routinely slurred to "ampersand" and the term crept into common English usage by around 1837.