<Table> <Tr> <Td> </Td> <Td> This article contains Indic text . Without proper rendering support, you may see question marks or boxes, misplaced vowels or missing conjuncts instead of Indic text . </Td> </Tr> </Table> <Tr> <Td> </Td> <Td> This article contains Indic text . Without proper rendering support, you may see question marks or boxes, misplaced vowels or missing conjuncts instead of Indic text . </Td> </Tr> <P> In writing and typography, a ligature occurs where two or more graphemes or letters are joined as a single glyph . An example is the character æ as used in English, in which the letters a and e are joined . The common ampersand (&) developed from a ligature in which the handwritten Latin letters e and t (spelling et, from the Latin for "and") were combined . </P> <P> The origin of typographical ligatures comes from the invention of writing with a stylus on fibrous material (like paper) or clay . Businessmen especially who needed a way to speed up the process of written communication found that conjoining letters and abbreviating words for lay use was more convenient for record keeping and transaction than the bulky long forms . The earliest known script, Sumerian cuneiform, includes many cases of character combinations that, over time, gradually evolve from ligatures into separately recognizable characters . Ligatures figure prominently in many historical manuscripts, notably the Brahmic abugidas, or the bind rune of the Migration Period Germanic runic inscriptions . </P>

What is it called when two letters are joined together