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:
History of the alphabet
The order of the letters of the alphabet is attested from the fourteenth century BCE in the town of Ugarit on Syria's northern coast. Tablets found there bear over one thousand cuneiform signs, but these signs are not Babylonian and there are only thirty distinct characters. About twelve of the tablets have the signs set out in alphabetic order. There are two orders found, one of which is nearly identical to the order used for Hebrew, Greek and Latin, and a second order very similar to that used for Ethiopian.