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 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.
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