how do different alphabets get developed over time?
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Historically, different cultures developed their alphabets locally. We had spoken language for a LOT longer than written language, so regional language differences happened long before alphabets did.
In most cases, script of some kind (but not an *alphabet*) forms for one of three reasons, from most to least common:
1. Trade and economics, because you need to be able to keep track of all those valuable goods
2. Religious practices, because if you’ve just made a prediction of what will happen, people want to know what it was later on
3. To record cultural information, such as stories or poetry
Most scripts start out as pure ideographs, that is, little images that depict something specific and concrete. So you might draw a little stick figure man to mean the word “man.” You might draw a little sketch of a stalk of wheat to mean “grain.” Etc.
Over time, these ideographs tend to get simplified down to their easiest-to-draw (or “write”) components. At that point, you no longer have ideographs, but rather logographs, truly *symbols* that represent words. Chinese today is a logographic language, while Japanese has both logographic (*kanji*) and syllabic (*katakana*/*hiragana*) symbols.
Once you have actually symbolic characters, rather than miniature pictures, it becomes more realistic for these things to get used as *letters* instead of as *whole words*; effectively, the language becomes a rebus, where each symbol stands for the first letter of the word it was associated with. So, for example, you might use an “eye” symbol to represent the letter “I” because “eye” sounds like “I.” You might use a heart symbol to represent “L” because hearts are about ***L***ove and ***L***ife. Etc.
In general, this sort of system evolves in one of three directions. First, it might become an alphabet, like the Latin, Greek, Cyrillic, etc. alphabets you’re familiar with. Second, it might become an “abugida” or “abjad”; abugidas are where vowels are marked with little symbols attached to consonant letters (e.g. the Devanagari script used in India), while abjads leave vowels merely implied or noted with (optional) diacritics (e.g. Hebrew and Arabic). Finally, it might become a “syllabary,” which is where there are distinct, specific symbols for each possible pair of consonant+vowel (this is how Japanese *hiragana* and *katakana* work.)
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