For instance, in Spanish, the letter “v” is pronouced like the letter “b” in English. Why not just use the letter b? Who decided that for this sound, we’re going to use this letter, even though other users of this alphabet use a different one? I’m not trying to be English-centric here. We could just as easily use the Italian “ci” for the English “ch.” And don’t get me started on how “eaux” somehow equates to a long “o.” I get that English has a different language branch than the Romance languages, but we all use (basically) the same alphabet.
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People already have mentioned sound changes, which for instance make the i pronounced as ee in English week (or something similar) in most languages, but in English often as in blind. But there is a second reason as well, and that is that writers of different languages just make different choices when adopting the Latin alphabet
The Latin alphabet, that we use in West-European languages, was originally designed for Latin, as the name implies. And designed is actually a wrong term, rather it was adapted from the Etruscan alphabet, who had adapted it from a version of the Greek alphabet, who had adapted the alphabet from Phoenicians I think, and with each adaptation people changed it, to make it more fitting for their languages. The result is that the Latin alphabet as it was in Classical times was a pretty good fit for Latin, but it had a few quirks, which comes from the fact that it wasn’t designed from scratch. (for instance, no indication of vowel length, of the letter x standing for two following consonants as only letter).
One of these quirks was that in classical times the letter u (or v, more on that later)could stand for both the oo sound in English fool, and the w sound in English water. This makes a bit of sense as the w sound a bit like a very short oo. However, over time Latin changed, and the w changed into the v pronunciation pretty quickly. (much much later, people started to differentiate between the two uses of u, and started using the form v for the consonant and the form u for the vowel). This left the alphabet without a letter for the w sound. As people started to use the Latin alphabet to write languages with a w sound, like many Germanic languages, people looked for a sollution, and one that became popular was writing uu instead of u if a w sound was used, and that evolved into our modern day letter w. However, in Romance languages, the u sound mostly occurred in diphthongs, that is combination of vowel sounds, like in Spanish bueno. In most of those cases no new letter was needed, as there is no reason to mispronounce it. Therefore Spanish doesn’t have a w in native words.
Similarly, the j (or rather the i, as like the v and u, they became separate letters much later) was originally the sound of y in yes, and as such is it was adopted in German and other Germanic languages. But in Romance languages there was a sound change that made it stronger, with different outcomes in different languages. In Old French it became the je sound of jet, and as English has a strong influence of Old French on its spelling system, English writers started to use j to write that particular sound. This left with no letter for the y sound in yes, but y was available to do that.
So part of the the answer is sound changes, that make languages drift more and more apart. However, a second reason is that as more and more languages were written with the Latin alphabet, it depended a bit on what language written in the Latin alphabet they were familiar with. Hungarian writers decided on using the j for the yes sound, but Swahili writers, more familiar with English, the y. The sh sound in shimmer is written as an x in Basque, because that is how the x letter was pronounced in Old Spanish, the written standard they were familiar with, but Slavic languages written with the Latin alphabet use a variant of the s letter with something added.
To go back to your particular examples; the v and b merged in Spanish, and when to use what letter is etymological; if Latin had a v Spanish uses a v, and if Latin had a b Spanish uses a b. Ch in English goes back to Old French. I don’t know why Old French used this particular letter combination for that sound, but it was needed as Latin doesn’t have that sound. Italian has two ways to write that particular sound. Before e and i they simply use c. C originally indicated the sound k sound in keep in Classical Latin, but in almost all Romance languages it changed into something else before e and i, and in Italian it is that ch sound. Ch isn’t available in Italian, because Italian uses ch for the k sound in keep, if it precedes an e or i. Therefore they chose a different letter combination before o, u and a, and that letter combination was ci.. The eau was pronounced as something like ah-ow at some point (that is the e sound of wet followed by the ow of now), but this got simplified, and the x stood for an s sound IIRC, which also got lost.
Part of it, to answer your question about ci and ch, has to do with the fact that way back in the Middle Ages, people didn’t learn to read and write their native language. They learned to read Latin, and then if for some reason they needed to write something in their language, they had to figure out a way to do it with Latin letters. Mainly this involved using consonant clusters or silent letters to represent sounds that Latin didn’t have. Different literary traditions across Europe came up with different ideas to make it work, and over time they standardized into the languages we know today.
because it’s a different language and you are hearing it as a native english speaker.
the B and V in spanish sound similar to both the b and v in english depending on spelling. Vamos is pronounced like bamos, but centavos is not pronounced like centabos. it’s pronounced with the english v sound.
sometimes the b and v are interchangeable in words, other times they are not.
you could make the same argument for the double LL in spanish which sounds like the Y in english.
languages aren’t just spoken, they are also written. the b and v or LL and Y matter. words that are pronounced the same (just like in english) are not the same words. baya/vaya/valla. haber/ a ver. bota/vota
Unlike the other Romance languages, Spanish went through a phonetic process called betacism (i.e. we pronounce two different graphs, b/v, as a bilabial consonant, except in some syllabic contexts). This phenomenon is thought to have happened at some point of the natural evolution from classic Latin to the vernacular Spanish. Portuguese, Italian and French make that phonemic distinction.
An alphabet has nothing to do with the variety of phonetic realizations for any graph. You have to take linguistic substrates into account since a language spoken by previous inhabitants before a conquest in a certain place affects the resulting languages.
There are a few reasons for this:
First, an alphabet is a way to represent the spoken language, which is always going to be more complex than the alphabet. Consider, for instance, the different ways that a New Englander and a Texan would pronounce the word “can’t”. Spoken languages come first, alphabets second.
Second, alphabets are rarely invented from scratch to fit each language. The Latin alphabet we use in English was developed from the Old Italic script, itself derived from the archaic Greek alphabet, which in turn derives from the Phoenician alphabet. When adapting an alphabet to a new language, the people doing the adaptation have to do their best to agree on a fit. Sometimes, the alphabet is modified to improve the fit (e.g., by adding diacritics). Sometimes it isn’t.
Third, once an alphabet is in use, it can conserve older forms of pronunciation, as the spoken language changes but the written language resists. /u/Tayttajakunnus mentions the example of “knight”. Modern Icelandic is similar, in that the orthography doesn’t directly reflect many features of pronunciation (e.g., *ll* is pronounced *tl*). In the case of Romance languages, including Romance borrowings in English after the Norman conquest, those spellings were often influenced by late Latin, too.
Spelling can change, of course. In archaic Latin, K was used for the hard c sound, while C was used for the hard g sound. But as C began to be used for the hard c, and G was introduced as a new letter for hard g, K became redundant and persisted only in a few words such as Kalends. (That’s why the Roman praenomens Gaius and Gnaeus are abbreviated as C. and Cn., respectively: the abbreviations preserve the old hard g sound of C.) The spelling of Romance languages did evolve in some ways to somewhat better match pronunciation. And sometimes there are attempts at spelling reform to match the alphabet with the way words are pronounced now, e.g., the 1996 German spelling reform. But once you adapt an alphabet to a language, you’re likely to wind up down the road with odd divergences between current pronunciation and current spelling.
Language evolves steadily over time, based on the conventions of the geographic areas where it’s spoken or written.
Sometimes languages start out with the same alphabet and diversify over time. Other times preexisting languages “adopt” an alphabet and map their existing sounds to the alphabet as best they can.
The Roman alphabet was created to match the set of sounds that classical Latin was composed of. For classical Latin, one letter matches one sound. Because of the importance of the Roman Empire and the continued use of Latin after its end, when other languages came to be written, the Roman alphabet was used, and where sounds in those languages were the same as in classical Latin, those letters were used. Where sounds that did not exist in classical Latin existed in those languages, modifications were made, either using accent markings, combinations of letters (eg ch, th, sh in English), or just accepting that a letter might have a slightly different sound.
Until the invention of the printing press, it was normal for people to just write phonetically. There was no concept of fixed spellings, you would just put the letters that correspond to how you speak on the page. People with different regional accents would write things differently, and the person reading it would just have to figure it out. After the printing press was invented, things changed, and the idea of a “standard” correct spelling of words took hold. Even if I say the word as “root” and you say it as “rowt”, we both spell it as “route”.
The problem is, the way people actually pronounce words changes over time. In different languages and different dialects and accents within different languages, those changes happen differently. While some spellings have changed to a greater or lesser extent, in most languages, the spellings have been more likely to remain fixed than the way people actually speak the language. The result of this is that spellings reflect the sounds of their spoken languages several centuries ago, for each respective language, and often the way it was spoken in a specific, often prestige accent and dialect from that time in the past.
A further complication comes when words are borrowed from one language to another. Often when a word enters from a foreign language, the foreign spelling comes with it. In some cases the spelling and pronunciation from the source language remain, in some cases the spelling is changed to match the spelling conventions of the language that borrowed it, and in other cases people using the word change it to match the odd spelling.
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There are various reasons for this, but the most important are:
1. Sound changes — even if a language does have a very phonetic spelling system, with time there would be sound changes that would make it less phonetic. For example the silent h in romance languages or the silence e on the end of English words used to be pronounced. Sometimes sounds merge (like with Spanish b and v). Sometimes they split (like with English vowels that have different pronounciations). You could have a spelling reform, but that is always controversial.
2. Loanwords — sometimes the people responsible for creating a spelling system want to keep the way loanwords are spelled, sometimes they get adopted phonetically. The first can add to the chaos of spelling.
3. Different sound inventories — when a language adopts a writing system from another language it usually has to do some adjustments. Create ways to spell sounds that don’t exist in the other language, drop or repurpose letters that are no longer needed. E.g. the whole confusion about the letter <c> can be traced to the fact, that Etruscans didn’t differentiate between [g] and [k] sounds, but they were the intermediate ones between Greeks and Romans, that both did.
It didn’t start that way, in various regions the sounds changed due to people mispronouncing things. Over time a mutation gets so popular that it just becomes the new “correct”. That’s how you get Spanish, French, Portuguese, and Italian languages (as some examples) being variations of Latin. If everyone stuck to being perfect “by the book” per se than language wouldn’t evolve and most of Europe would still speak Latin.
You can also just look at regional dialects of the same language. In Boston the letter R sounds like “ah” to other English speakers. In the south east US the letters “oi” together sound like “er” (oil rhymes with Earl).
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