In the history of the Latin alphabet, ligatures have come and gone. As someone who commonly has his head buried in medieval manuscripts, I can tell you that pr

In the history of the Latin alphabet, ligatures have come and gone. As someone who commonly has his head buried in medieval manuscripts, I can tell you that printers have been trying to squeeze more economy out of a sheet of paper to a much greater degree then, as now. Every common word-ending, for instance, had a unique ligature, as did many small words. The ampersand, incidentally, was one of them. Some of these manuscripts are almost syllabic. It makes sense when every letter has to be set individually. As type become progressively easier to set, ligatures ceased to be so much about economy and speed, but rather about aesthetics. Some relics, such as the ampersand still remain. And now, with Unicode, effectively, locking alphabets down to a much greater degree than at any time in the history of the human race, I can't see this happening.