Because they chose words and sounds purely based on whether they sounded pretty.
Ignore me. This thought was based on false information that I neglected to fact check 😔 learned my lesson there! Apologies for any hard feelings!
Source of correction: a literal linguist 🤦♂️
Exactly.
I’d say that’s most languages in a nutshell - they start wherever, then grow organically based on a million reasons.
And the written form is nothing more than an attempt to capture how it sounds, to codify how it’s currently used, not to be prescriptive.
John McWhorter explains this really well in “Great Languages of the World” - he’s pretty light-hearted and amused by things like how convoluted and inconsistent English is, while also delving into how different languages likely came to be the way they are.