How did so many languages end up with such similar alphabets?
Most European languages seems to share a very large amount of their respective alphabets. The pronunciation may be different but the symbol is the same.
Why?
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Because most of them are based on very few languages, e.g. Latin.
But the Latin alphabet looks very different from the alphabet you see in most of these countries I'm referring to
Dark green is Latin based. It's like almost all of Europe. What countries do you speak of then?
English, French, German, Spanish. The main languages descended from Latin. They all have extremely similar alphabets that imo don't resemble Latin characters at all.
You sure you've seen thr Latin alphabet? Maybe you've mixed it up with Greek? I'm not trying to be mean or anything, I'm just really confused... the pronunciation is certainly different but the characters are mostly same
You are completely correct that's exactly what I did lmao I apologize for the confusion.
Jajaja I read your comment a few times and only got more confused. Latin actually partially comes from Greek which is why there are several letters in common Edit: accidentally posted Spanish Wikipedia, my bad
This is adorable - we're all human though, fortunately humble pie tastes great
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When you speak, those in hearing hear your words, and then they're gone. You speak again, and can choose to say things differently. Thus, the spoken word evolves. New phrases, new pronunciations.
When you write, the written text exists and persists, potentially for a long time. At various times in history, writing has been something that took time or expensive materials, so it was less common to do it for trivial or short-lived purposes. It's easy to forget in the modern digital age with the disposable, ephemeral nature of Twitter and text messaging, but by its very nature, writing is designed to last. Therefore, it evolves more slowly.
That brutally simplifies a whole field of linguistic research, but it's an explanation.
making a new writing system and getting widely used is hard. it's easier to just use someone else's.
As far as I recall, Sanskrit an Indo-European language, and shares a lot of word roots with the Romance and Germanic languages of Europe.
I was told that the Korean writing system was invented by a king to bring logic, phoneticism, clarity and simplicity to replace the complexity of the Chinese type characters they previously used.
I can't ever explain it as well as Robwords on Youtube does. Watch THE ALPHABET EXPLAINED: The origin of every letter
I'd recommend watching this video which follows the evolution of the letter W. This YouTuber also has one for the letter C. He covers the general evolution of the current alphabet in these videos.