eli5 How do languages have the same alphabet (like Spanish and English) but are so different with their words?
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They aren’t *exactly* the same but I get what you are saying.
In short, it’s because spoken language changes a lot faster than written language. Like, think about learning how to read. Most people probably remember having to like…learn how to do that. It’s a skill that’s very difficult and not exactly “natural.”
But speaking? Humans pick that up naturally and we each add our own little quirks to it, often without even realizing it, and over time quirks from a specific place add up and you end up with a new language.
But nobody is out there adding little quirks to the written language without even realizing it. so it’s more rigid and unchanging in general. Like think about right now, you can easily create a new word. but you can’t easily just add a new letter to your keyboard can you?
As for why almost all European languages use the same alphabet? Well, we all inherited it from the Romans and just kinda stuck with it. So the alphabet stayed the same, or changed very little, while the languages diverged. They Cyrillic Alphabet used by Russia and several countries in Eastern Europe and Central Asia is the same situation, only that alphabet is more Greek, rather than Roman. (this gets complicated and weird because the Roman alphabet is itself derived from the Greek one)
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