Why are the names of the letters different across languages using the Latin script?

Question

I have noticed that the Spanish alphabet has the 26 letters + the consonant ñ, which is pronounced like the "ny" in "canyón". But out of the remaining 26 letters, I have noticed that the consonants have different names from the names in English. Why can't all the 26 letters be given universal names for all the Latin script languages?

Answer 1

Why can't all the 26 letters be given universal names for all the Latin languages?

They used to, in fact! Well…mostly.

Back in the days of the Roman empire, there were mostly consistent names for the letters of the alphabet: ā, bē, cē, dē, ē and so on. There was a bit of variation in some of them, like ef versus effe, hȳ versus ȳ-graeca, and ex versus ix, but for the most part they were consistent.

But languages change over time. At one point, for example, English shifted all of its "long E" sounds from IPA /e:/ (as in café) to IPA /i:/ (as in machine). And this affected the letter names they'd borrowed from Latin: that's how we got "bee, dee, ee, gee" versus Spanish be, de, e, ge, etc.

Other differences might have originated from variations within Latin, such as the ef versus effe mentioned by Roman grammarians. Some letters didn't exist within Latin, such as W, Ñ, and J, so those were given names later. The letter Z was renamed in American English, by analogy with C, D, E, and so on. But most of the differences can be traced back to English changing all its long vowels somewhere around the fifteenth century, a process called the "Great Vowel Shift".

Answer 2

The main reason is that it would be impossible to agree on a name. Is "z" to be called "tset", "zed", "zee", "zeta" and so on? What about the letters that are not used in English – what do we call ç?

We have different names for letters because names for letters developed long ago from different sources. The Latin name for "z" is based on the Greek name which is based on the Semitic name; the letter "f" derives from a Semitic letter for [w], called waw. Here is an account of the Latin letter names, which explains much about current names.

Answer 3

It happened because of the splitting of the Roman Empire. Before that, the letters were called "[a~æ], [be], [se], [de], [e~ɛ], [ef]/[efe], etc. . ." and were pretty consistent, other than a few minor differences. Note that at this time the letters denoted ⟨J⟩, ⟨W⟩, ⟨X⟩ and a few others did not exist. After the Roman empire split, things stayed the same for a while.

However, the letters ⟨J⟩, ⟨W⟩, and ⟨X⟩ where introduced into the then 23 letter Latin alphabet. Unlike most European languages, the Spaniards had no need for ⟨J⟩ for the sound [j], which they were already representing with ⟨Y⟩ and ⟨LL⟩. They did however have a use for it as [h], since the letter ⟨H⟩ was either silent or marking aspiration in most contexts. They called it [hotə] which made a lot of sense. When encountering ⟨W⟩, they had already split ⟨U⟩ and ⟨V⟩ so the called it [ðoble.ve], and they most retained the original name of ⟨X⟩, calling it [eki].

Meanwhile, English had it's own changes. All [eː] sounds shifted to [i] sounds during the great vowel shift, we had no use of ⟨J⟩ as [j], so instead used it for [d͡ʒ] and called it [d͡ʒej]. When English speakers encountered ⟨W⟩, we'd not yet split ⟨U⟩ and ⟨V⟩. As a result, we called it [dəbəl.ju]. Finally, we used ⟨X⟩ to represent the common consonant cluster [ks~kz], and called it [ekz] accordingly.

After a few more small changes, it reached the point where we are today.

As nice as it'd be, such standardization is unfortunately impossible. It would require asking about two billion people to start completely changing everything about their alphabet. It would require completely changing early education, and forcing the changes in a legal context.

If such standardization was possible, we'd all be speaking Esperanto.