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Comment by schoen | Hacker News Reader

I'm really impressed by these people! It's pretty rare (by fraction of languages) to know exactly who originally devised your writing system.

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that is in fact a very interesting list, although I guess this page[0] is a bit more useful, as it contains "what was invented by whom".

Personally I've always been fascinated by Spurius Carvilius Ruga[1], who invented the single letter "G" for the latin alphabet :)

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_creators_of_writing_sy... [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spurius_Carvilius_Ruga

Sadly J must have not been invented yet since G suffered the same fate of overloading that its predecessor C did :(

J is in fact a much more recent invention than many of us would suppose[0]. It is worth adding, however, that it would not have saved G, except in English; our pronunciation of J, while close to the French and a couple others (with an added /d/ at the front), is quite unique among languages that were written in the Roman alphabet at the time.

In any case, English suffers quite a few more more overloaded consonants that C and G. Most occurrences of /z/ (a frequent sound in English) are marked with an S (codes), and a great many /t/ sounds are written D (typed).

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J#History

Emperor Claudius (the successor to Caligula) invented three new letters for the Latin alphabet, but they didn't stick:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Claudian_letters

Most written languages are not engineered and created as an orthography by a definitive, singular entity but usually organically grown over time with a great deal of authors. Some people joke that Arabic scholars are thought to have created a great Standard Arabic written language because every Arabic dialect speaker is convinced their dialect is the closest to the standard. But Cherokee's written language was created by a single person (Sequoyah) but unfortunately far too late in their history to help save the collapse of the civilization through the benefits of written, standardized communication.

Koreans learn a lot about their written language throughout school much in the same way people in America learn about American history legends, and given it's one of the crowning achievements of their culture, Koreans not knowing about its history would be like Americans never learning about the Industrial Revolution in their courses or Democracy. I suppose the difference is that most Koreans know enough about 한글 that they can explain its inception while most Americans hardly know the differences between the executive and legislative branches.

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