Some obscure (or not) letters and diacritics I have come across
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The diaeresis mark: “ä”. In English, unambiguously indicates a vowel is pronounced separately from the one before it: Noël (no-el, not nol), coöperate (co-operate, not coop-erate), mediëval (medi-eval, not me-die-val), etc. Quite rare except on loanwords. Not like the German umlaut at all.
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The macron: “ā”. Represents a lengthened vowel sound in transcriptions of some other languages, for example Japanese in Hepburn romanisation: Tokyo is actually Tōkyō, or とうきょう “Toukyou”.
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The cedilla: “ç”. In French (among others), represents a “c” pronounced like an “s”: “façade”.
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The eszett: “ß”. Represents a double s-like sound, i.e. “ss” (or “sz”). Originally because there was another letter in the alphabet for a “long s”, “ſ”. “ß” is thus a ligature of “ſs” (originally “ſʒ” (“sz”, hence eszett) but apparently our fonts messed it up back in the day). It is not pronounced like the letter “b”. And related to that…
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The long s: “ſ”. A former letter in English that was used in place of “s” for non-terminal letters, such as in this cover page for Paradiſe Loſt. The title is not pronounced “Paradife Loft”. And related to that…
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The thorn: “þ”. Another former letter in English that was pronounced like “th”, as in “þe”, “the”. In some fonts this character came to appear like “y”, leading to words like “ye”, pronounced “the”. So the “ye” in a phrase like “ye old times”, is not actually pronounced “ye”…
