<P> Outside of professional papers on specific subjects that traditionally use ligatures in loanwords, ligatures are seldom used in modern English . The ligatures æ and œ were until the 19th century (slightly later in American English) used in formal writing for certain words of Greek or Latin origin, such as encyclopædia and cœlom, although such ligatures were not used in either classical Latin or ancient Greek . These are now usually rendered as "ae" and "oe" in all types of writing, although in American English, a lone e has mostly supplanted both (for example, encyclopedia for encyclopaedia, and maneuver for manoeuvre). </P> <P> Some fonts for typesetting English contain commonly used ligatures, such as for ⟨ tt ⟩, ⟨ fi ⟩, ⟨ fl ⟩, ⟨ ffi ⟩, and ⟨ ffl ⟩ . These are not independent letters, but rather allographs . </P> <P> Diacritic marks mainly appear in loanwords such as naïve and façade . As such words become naturalised in English, there is a tendency to drop the diacritics, as has happened with old borrowings such as hôtel, from French . Informal English writing tends to omit diacritics because of their absence from the keyboard, while professional copywriters and typesetters tend to include them . Words that are still perceived as foreign tend to retain them; for example, the only spelling of soupçon found in English dictionaries (the OED and others) uses the diacritic . Diacritics are also more likely to be retained where there would otherwise be confusion with another word (for example, résumé (or resumé) rather than resume), and, rarely, even added (as in maté, from Spanish yerba mate, but following the pattern of café, from French). </P> <P> Occasionally, especially in older writing, diacritics are used to indicate the syllables of a word: cursed (verb) is pronounced with one syllable, while cursèd (adjective) is pronounced with two . È is used widely in poetry, e.g. in Shakespeare's sonnets . J.R.R. Tolkien uses ë, as in O wingëd crown . Similarly, while in chicken coop the letters - oo - represent a single vowel sound (a digraph), in obsolete spellings such as zoölogist and coöperation, they represent two . This use of the diaeresis is rarely seen, but persists into the 2000s in some publications, such as MIT Technology Review and The New Yorker . </P>

Who invented the english alphabet we use today