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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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.
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