English terms with diacritical marks
The Old English Latin alphabet began to replace the Runic alphabet in the 9th century, due to the influence of Celtic Christian missionaries to the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms. The orthography of Old English – which was entirely handwritten in its own time – was not well standardized, though it did not use all the Latin letters, and included several letters not present in the modern alphabet. When reprinted (on a printing press or computer) in modern times, an overdot is occasionally used with two Latin letters to differentiate sounds for the reader:
Fingerspelling
There are two families of manual alphabets used for representing the Latin alphabet in the modern world. The more common of the two is mostly produced on one hand, and can be traced back to alphabetic signs used in Europe from at least the early 15th century. The alphabet, first described completely by Spanish monks, was adopted by the Abbé de l'Épée's deaf school in Paris in the 18th century, and was then spread to deaf communities around the world in the 19th and 20th centuries via educators who had learned it in Paris. Over time, variations have emerged, brought about by natural phonetic changes that occur over time, adaptions for local written forms with special characters or diacritics (which are sometimes represented with the other hand), and avoidance of handshapes that are considered obscene in some cultures. The most widely used modern descendant is the American manual alphabet.