How did missionaries create writing systems for Greenlandic?

Missionaries were instrumental in developing writing systems for Greenlandic by adapting the Roman alphabet to capture the language's unique phonetics.

The first book in an Eskimo language was published in 1742 by the Dano-Norwegian missionary Hans Egede, who utilized the standard Roman alphabet.1

In 1851, Samuel Kleinschmidt, a missionary with the Moravian Brethren, significantly refined this approach by systematizing the Greenlandic orthography. To better represent the distinctive sounds of the language, he introduced a special letter along with three specific accents. While this system was widely used for over a century, it was eventually replaced in 1973 by a new orthography based on the current Roman alphabet.1