eli5 How do languages have the same alphabet (like Spanish and English) but are so different with their words?
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The alphabets aren’t exactly the same. For example English does not use accented letters at all outside of a few loan words from languages that do have those in their alphabet.
That comment aside, it’s because they are descended from a common root with a specific alphabet. The romance languages are all localizations of Latin. French, Spanish, Italian Portuguese, a few others.
English is the result of french from norman conquerors mixing with the local languages of the British Isles. The french were the ruling, educated class so their writing system and alphabet took over during the merge, so the English alphabet has the same root as the Spanish one even if the spoken language and vocabulary is of more mixed descent
Look outside the romance language family to say, Arabic or Mandarin and you get a whole different setup much as you’d expect. Or to one that was more strongly mixed with other influences and you get things like Cyrillic which shares a number of characters but diverges much more strongly than the Spanish and English example you gave.
Edits for a couple unfortunate autocorrects. As much as I love the vision of barbarians wandering through Tesco “British aisles” was not correct lol.
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