Thanks. Some alphabets have precomposed ligatures that aren't really letters, like old German alphabets with tz, ch, ss (I only know how to type the last one, ß, because the others have died out over the last hundred years).

Actually in German (at least) ä, ö and ü really are actually ligatures for ae, oe, and ue -- the scribes started to write the E's on their sides above the base letters, and over time the superscript "E"s became dots or dashes. Often they are described the other way around: "you can type oe if you can't type ö." That's what my kid was told in school!

But Ö and ß aren't really part of the alphabet in German, while, say, in Swedish, ä and ö became actual letters of the alphabet. English got W that way too.

That's sounds a bit false to me. The Umlaute (ä,ö, ü) and the "eszett" ß are actually part of the German alphabet[1]. Also it is kinda weird to describe them as ligatures of the original letters and the diaeresis, because while this is what they started out as a long time ago, they are just their own letters now (as opposed to "real" stylistic ligatures like combining fi into one glyph). The advice your kid was told that they can be replaced with ae, oe and ue is correct - it is a replacement nowadays.

[1] https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deutsches_Alphabet

They sure are letters, but they aren't generally thought of as being in the alphabet (which seems to be why they are just kinda tacked on after a space on wikipedia) and get ordered as if they where just the base letter (mostly)

Note that in Swedish they are considered letters, and in Danish and Norwegian Æ, Ø and Å are letters.

Letters which are sorted separately from what we'd think of as the base characters in English (they appear at the end of the alphabet, as W X Y Z Æ Ø Å, with C often omitted in Norwegian).

By contrast, my French dictionary has énorme nestled between enorgueillir and enquiérir. (Looking for an example does underscore some of the patterns in the language: page after page of ét~ with only a few et~ and one êt~ among them; pages of ex~ with no éx~ at all.)

Similarly in Swedish, W was not considered a letter but just a variant of V, so in phone books etc all the W names were mixed in with V names. This was changed in 2006 due to an increase in English loanwords.

C'mon that page is highly technical, really just listing the letters or glyphs used for forming printed text. In reality, if you walk into any first grade classroom you see pictures of the letters A-Z with pictures (Apfel, Bär, uwv) and then after the end maybe around the corner, what, Öl? I can't even remember. When the kids recite the letters they don't recite äöüß. TBH I really only remember this because when kiddo was that age the Neue Rechtscribung transition was mid-process and the parents were angrily divided so I was kinda paying attention.

Also, though it's hardly authoritative, my kids' school taught English through immersion from grade 1 too, and both German and English teachers said "same alphabet".

As bmicraft pointed out, even in that wikipedia chart those inflected letters are spaced apart from the others. Yes, they are letterforms, but not part of the "alphabet" -- they don't even have a sorting like the Swedish Ä or W do.

And you can switch in running text from using the marker for umlaut (dots or bar, not semantically dieresis) or a normal "e" without anyone blinking. There's no problem reading a Swiss book even though ß refuses to cross the border. Though I personally prefer to read Äpfel and Bär rather than Aepfel and Baer, really, they are the same.

> When the kids recite the letters they don't recite äöüß.

On a somehow related side note, I read that "&", which is derived from a ligature of the Latin conjunction "Et" (meaning "and"), was named "ampersand" in English as a mondegreen for "and per se and" as it used to be placed at the end of the English alphabet recitation.

> old German alphabets with tz, ch, ss (I only know how to type the last one, ß, because the others have died out over the last hundred years)

They still ꜩ on some German street signs. I can't find ch in Unicode though (could just be my old eyes).

You sent me on an enjoyable wild goose chase but it appears that only ß and ff are in unicode: tz, ch, ck have to be handled completely in rendering.

I have my music teacher's German schoolbook from around 1915 and it lists them all as letters (the whole book is in Fraktur). I have various old books in Fraktur and once could read them. I imagine that if I sat down and tried to read one it would come back, but at the moment I have to thin a little to read just the titles!