|
I had heard this before, but didn't know whether it was true. Neat!
@Asawi - It's certainly possible that some of the characters aren't represented anymore in modern versions of various languages. The English language lost quite a few characters during the periods of middle and early modern English, because they apparently didn't care enough to make their own typefaces for print, and imported them from other European countries instead. Problem is, a lot of the languages in those countries didn't use all of the letters that English did, and therefore their typefaces didn't include them.
In some cases this culling of the English alphabet was for the best - wynn, for example, was a completely redundant letter. But in other cases, like with thorn, useful and logical letters were lost. Some of these letters were used up until just a couple hundred years ago (often substituted with other Latin letters in print).
So, it is certainly possible that you've run across letters that simply don't exist anymore. And there is indeed no way for you to represent them on your keyboard - at least not without special characters.
|