eli5 How do languages have the same alphabet (like Spanish and English) but are so different with their words?
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TLDR: The Roman Empire
Most Western languages share the Latin Alphabet, and many of them had Latin as their root language.
The influence of the Roman Empire on Europe is still very much felt today almost 2000 years later. Their language, alphabet, calendar, some roman customs and festivals, and even trivial things like the standard width of a road were all defined in Roman times.
Spanish, Portuguese, French, Italian, and Romanian are referred to as the Romance languages because they all derived from Latin. The local languages mixed with Latin becoming local Latin dialects, and over 2000 years in relative isolation evolved into their own unique but still similar languages.
German and English are derived from West Germanic but still use a lot of words derived from Latin. This is the result of various conquests, trade, and knowledge sharing throughout 2000 years of European day-to-day life.
In the medieval era literacy overall was very low and Church Latin became a de-facto universal language for Europe. The Latin alphabet was therefore kept alive and while some European languages had their own script they were all eventually converted over to the Latin alphabet.
Many languages do have their own unique characters and accents like the French éèê but the basic character set is the same.
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