Not sure where J came from.
One question is why we borrowed K when we already had C. In modern English, C is more or less a completely superfluous letter, adding unnecessary complexity to pronunciation. Seeing my son try to pronounce "cycle" is one of many examples.
J was introduced because I had a similar problem, except I could be either a consonant or a vowel, rather than any of two consonants. The same applied to the introduction of U for V. Well, almost the same. In the case of I, they added J to be the consonant, while in the case of V, they added U to be the vowel.
Finally, people changed the pronunciation of V over time to be something new, and W was introduced to be the original sound in English. W does not exist in Latin since V fulfills its role, unless you are using a modern pronunciation that changes how V is pronounced and then you still do not need W. There were other sound changes (see Italian), but this is sufficient to explain all of the letters. Well, there is also Z, which they removed from early Latin and later reintroduced to represent a Greek sound.
English doesn’t. Bernard Shaw tried inventing new letters. I guess that changing the English alphabet os a slippery slope. If you make it as phonetic as the Latin script is meant to be, and with special characters, people would have to relearn how to read from scratch
As I understand (in a simplified way), every once in a while (once in a few centuries) there's a major language reform to make written form reflect current pronunciation as much as possible, but already in 100—200 years people would start asking "why do we write not like we pronounce", until some political movement decides reforming orthography would promote their agenda. Then the cycle continues.
Old English had four letters that are not in today's US-ASCII, two of which are borrowed from a runic alphabet rather than created by modifying Latin letters.
It's also a bit arbitrary whether a modified Latin letter is regarded as a new character or an existing character modified by a diacritic: take Ø, for example. And there are characters like Æ. And never forget what Turkish did: add dotless i so that ordinary i could then be regarded as dotless i plus a diacritic (though of course it isn't usually regarded that way).
Even though I know almost nothing at all about the subject of medieval palaeography in Western Europe, I did read recently the write-downs of a Italian conference focused on the subject of palaeography in the Italian Middle Ages, and that is how I learned about stuff like La minuscola cancelleresca and La mercantesca. A link (in Italian, google translate can help) [1] about these two styles of writing and how they were formed:
> la MINUSCOLA CANCELLERESCA, usata dai notai e dalla classe colta non universitaria, e la MERCANTESCA, scrittura professionale dei mercanti, usata anche per testi letterari (ma solo in lingua volgare).
via google translate
> the MINUSCULE CANCELLERESCA, used by notaries and the non-university educated class, and the MERCANTESCA, the professional writing of merchants, also used for literary texts (but only in the vernacular).
[1] https://spotlight.vatlib.it/it/latin-paleography/feature/17-...
WillAdams•5h ago