I mean:
English
Russian
French? (how did this happen? France --> French?!?)
Chinese
And someone from Afghanistan is an Afghan? How did the word get shorter not longer? 🤔
Also, why is a person from India called an Indian, but the language is called Hindi? This breaks my brain…
Philippines --> Filipino? They just saw the “Ph” and decided to use an “F”? 🤔
Okay idk how language even works anymore…
[This is an open discusssion thread on languages and their quirks…]
Latin. In fact it’s where this mess started out.
Ancient Greek had a three-way distinction between the following sets of consonants:
Latin borrowed a lot of Greek words. The words with the second and third set of consonants were no problem; they were mostly spelled in Latin with ⟨P T C⟩ and ⟨B D G⟩. But Latin didn’t have the sounds of the first set, and for Latin speaking ears they sounded like they had /h/. So they were spelled with ⟨PH TH CH⟩, to represent that /h/ sound.
So back then the digraphs still made sense… except that Greek changed over time. And what used to be pronounced /pʰ tʰ kʰ/ ended as /f θ x/ (like English fill, think, and Scottish loch). And Latin speakers started pronouncing those words with the “new” Greek sounds instead of the old ones. But they were still spelling them the same.
From that that ⟨PH⟩ spread out across a lot of orthographies using the Latin alphabet.