David Cargill (1809-1843), a scottish missionary and pioneer in the study of the Fijian Language, devised a way of writing Fijian with the Latin alphabet based on the Ba'u (Bauan) dialect. He came up with several spelling systems, noted the reactions of the Fijians to them and abandoned the ones that didn't work. At first he represented sounds like /mb/ and /nd/ with two letters: mb and nd, but the Fijians read these as two separate sounds. Eventually he hit upon a spelling system that made sense to the Fijians and which has been in use ever since.