[mikequinlan]

Clearly the early scribes were looking forward to the 7-bit ASCII code and needed to reduce the number of characters that were represented.

[mousethatroared]

You're not wrong, except the technological reason. As I understand it, English lost a lot of characters when the movable type printing press was created.

[eesmith]

Only þ (thorn) died with the printing of Caxton's Bible using y-, for cost reasons.

The other letters -- ƿ (wynn), æ (ash), and ð (eth) -- went out of use long before movable type printing. https://www.deadlanguagesociety.com/p/the-lost-letters-of-th...

[bawolff]

If you go early enough, my understanding is that people would write accents in ascii by doing:

e <backspace character> '

Which was called "overstriking".

[kps]

Yes, this was explicitly called out in the ASCII standard, and is the reason ASCII has ~ (in place of the proposed ‾) and ‘^’ (which replaced the ‘↑’ in the original 1963 version).

[int_19h]

This comes from typewriters. Curiously, the reason why Esperanto uses Ĉ, Ĝ, Ĥ, Ĵ, and Ŝ is because the circumflex was present on French typewriters (which were very common in Europe at the time). Even though French itself only uses it for Â, Ê, Û - since it was a distinct key used for overtyping, it could be repurposed in this manner, just like Unicode combining marks today.

[PyWoody]

If you go back even further, you get the iota subscript [0]

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iota_subscript

[KurSix]

All hail the first software engineers of the scriptorium

[bravesoul2]

But they added extra letters to words to make up for lack of number of letters. They'd be fans of utf-8 maybe.