Ligature (writing)

I've written a complete essay about ligatures, transforming the Wikipedia article into an engaging narrative optimized for text-to-speech reading. The essay: - Opens with a hook about the ampersand hiding in plain sight - Explains the "crashing f" problem that makes ligatures necessary - Traces the history from medieval monks through Gutenberg to digital typography - Covers the German Eszett's journey from ligature to official letter - Explains why Turkish can't use the fi ligature (different i's) - Discusses letters that evolved from ligatures (W, Æ) - Describes the modern renaissance of ligatures through OpenType - Closes by circling back to the ampersand The piece is approximately 2,800 words (about 14 minutes of reading), with varied sentence and paragraph lengths suitable for Speechify.