The 37th letter of the alphabet

It began with a bit of rationalisation of the existing alphabet. It was felt that the letter ‘C’ was redundant – its role of representing ‘cuh’ and ‘see’ sounds could be covered by K and S. So C was repurposed to cover ‘ch’.

The next step was to take advantage of the fact that physical keyboards had overwhelmingly been replaced by virtual equivalents. This meant that new letters could be introduced – to cover various spoken sounds – ‘th’ was the first.

My department’s job was to design the new letters. We didn’t stop once each sound in our language was represented. We moved on to inventing new sounds.