> For those of you who natively speak (and write) a language that has characters not found in the traditional 26-letter Roman alphabet, such as æ or þ, how do you write it when you're writing cursive? Things like ø seem easy enough (write it like an o and then slash it like an x when you finish the word, I'd imagine), but for some of those ligatures and other way nonstandard letters I'm at a loss as to how to do them.
>
> -Eric "I've got the ß down pat, though" Sleator
> Tue 9 Jul A.D. 2002

When I learned Old English, I wrote æ the same way I write cursive a e, but with the e closer so they run together. I wrote cursive þ the same way as p but with the round bit further down. Those letters seem to turn out that way naturally because they're similar enough to familiar ones.

When I learned Russian, we learned and practised writing the alphabet in print and cursive, the way the teacher showed us. Some of the letters look quite different from print to cursive, same as ours. The page below is the first one that came up on Google when I went looking for an example; it's identical to the way I was taught.