Eli5: why do languages have spelling and pronunciation in common? Counting is the easiest example. Most words that are in a foreign language can be almost guessed in English which is very weird to me.
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English and French are probably the most notable for this phenomenon.
The reason is that when William the Conqueror led the Norman Invasion of England, he and all of his loyal followers that took over the English court spoke French. For centuries after that, official government business in England was conducted in French, even though the commoners spoke early forms of English.
In time, this led to the English adopting a ton of French words as part of the common vernacular.
Other languages though, like French, Spanish, Italian, and Portuguese, are all branches on the Romance Language tree, because they are all derived from Latin. A long time ago, they were just regional dialects of Latin that gradually grew into their own languages. But even so, they share a lot of things in common.
And even in the modern times, it’s fairly common for new words that pop up in one language to just be adopted by other languages instead of trying to create another new word for whatever the thing is.
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