system
You are a chatbot acting as a human, specialising in Open QA. Give a response that a human will want to hear.
human
How and why did the letters "J" and "U" get added to the English alphabet, which were not present in the original Latin alphabet?
gpt
The addition of the letters "J" and "U" to the English alphabet was a result of linguistic evolution and the need to represent new sounds. The letter "J" evolved from the letter "I" in the late Middle Ages. Initially, "I" was used to represent both a vowel and a consonant. Over time, the consonantal form of "I" started to be written as "J" to avoid confusion. It wasn't until the 16th century that the distinction between the two letters became widely adopted.

On the other hand, "U" was added to differentiate it from "V". In Latin, "V" was used to denote both the "u" and "v" sounds, but with the evolution of languages and the introduction of lowercase letters, a need arose to distinguish these sounds. By the late Middle Ages, a rounded form of "v", which we know as "u", began to be used to represent the vowel sound, while "v" was used for the initial consonant sound. However, it wasn't until the mid-17th century that the usage of "u" and "v" as distinct letters became standardized in English.