> It wasn't a letter of the alphabet any more than the dollar sign, the pound sign, or punctuation were letters of the alphabet.
I'm not aware of historic English alphabets that include the dollar or pound sign or any sort of punctuation. On the other hand there is a lot of evidence of & being part of the alphabet. Wikipedia has or links to plenty of cases:
Old Saxon alphabet: despite being on an alphabet page, it’s very clearly separated from the letters.
I’m not at all convinced that it was ever what you might call a letter of the alphabet. Although it seems to not have been rare to group it with the letters in some way, I have received the impression it wasn’t particularly common, and that it wasn’t how people generally thought of it. Nowadays we would draw a clear distinction between letters, numbers and symbols (maybe we have more symbols? though certainly fewer ligatures/abbreviations like Ƿᵉ), and call the alphabet just the letters, but I get the vibe that maybe “alphabet” wasn’t so strictly just the letters. But I handwave liberally and provide no sources in this mostly-uneducated suspicion of mine.
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I’m not at all convinced that it was ever what you might call a letter of the alphabet. Although it seems to not have been rare to group it with the letters in some way, I have received the impression it wasn’t particularly common, and that it wasn’t how people generally thought of it. Nowadays we would draw a clear distinction between letters, numbers and symbols (maybe we have more symbols? though certainly fewer ligatures/abbreviations like Ƿᵉ), and call the alphabet just the letters, but I get the vibe that maybe “alphabet” wasn’t so strictly just the letters. But I handwave liberally and provide no sources in this mostly-uneducated suspicion of mine.