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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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.
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