Written languages?

There's no such thing as a non-phonetic spoken language (it's like saying your dining room table isn't ripe yet, or something), so your question is a bit confusing.

A lot of today's alphabets are based on the Latin alphabet (NOT the English alphabet, as someone else said; when the Latin alphabet was first being borrowed extensively, there was no such thing as English). The problem with the Latin alphabet has always been that Latin has a fairly limited set of sounds - something like 22. Most other languages, even Romance languages (which evolved from Latin), have way more than that.

Thus, when people tried to write down what they were hearing using the limited toolset of the Latin alphabet, they came up with various workarounds - double letters, diacriticals, context-sensitive behavior of certain letters, etc. Scribes in one place obviously did not come up with the same workarounds as scribes in another place, but in any given place, eventually people settled on one particular set of workarounds. (Where "eventually" could mean a few hundred years, or a thousand or so years; and "settled on" could mean an organic process that just happened, or it could mean that some government entity issued a decree.)

From these different sets of workarounds come today's varying Latin-based alphabets. If you think about it, it's still not as confusing as when the Japanese language is written with Chinese characters: there, the writing has absolutely nothing to do with the pronunciation.

Another factor that can make alphabets and pronunciations diverge is that spelling conventions often don't keep up with language changes. See, for example, French. (All those silent letters were not always silent.)

Alphabets were designed by the Phoenicians (1200 to 800 BC) to faciliate trade in the Mediterranean. A written language system enabled cultures to:

1) Communicate across great distances without a messenger.

2) Preserve the oral culture and traditions

3) Develop a more complex system of communication

4) Advance knowledge in fields such as commerce, warfare, literature, and science.

and

5) Establish better social order (written decrees and laws - Hammurabi's Code)

Before long, the Greeks picked up on the Phoenician alphabet and created the Greek alphabet. If you look at the modern English alphabet, you can see many similiarities between our alphabet and that of Phoenicia and ancient Greek. From the Greek alphabet, many cultures caught on and established their respective alphabets.

I don't know what you mean by your second question, but alphabets are generally assigned arbitrarily in the beginning (such as the czech and the russian alphabets) - some king (generally) just decided to form a system of alphabets. Sounds are determined by linguists and assigned a letter or a series of letter. Even if the language is non-phonetic, there is generally a pattern to be found in the sound construction of the sentences so a letter system could be established.

Many languages, however, use an alphabet system derived from other languages. The most common alphabet source is the English alphabet. For example, Malay, Tagalog, and Indonesian use English letters exclusively in their language system, rather than coming up with their own alphabet.

Hope this helps!!

The basic misapprehension is that languages don't change. The problem is that languages do, but the script doesn't keep up.

A simple example is Italian which developed from Latin and kept largely to the Latin way of writing things, but the sounds changed. It is even more blatant in English, where the writing gave excellent indication of pronunciation for middle English, but pronunciation of modern English has changed so much from there that nowadays I advise any foreign learners with a phonetically written language to consider English a bit like Chinese, as a language where the written words have only a very tenuous connection to the spoken sound.

Each letter is a picture or rather a stylised picture. 'A' for example represents the head of a bull. First lengthen the horizontal part of the A so that it protrudes either side and then turn the A 90 degrees so that it is on its side. With a little imagination you can see that this is the head of the bull with ears sticking up and down. All the other letters of the alphabet are similar stylised pictures. The sound of the letter represents the sound made when saying bull although clearly not in modern English.

Many written languages developed from pictures.

Well, when the idea of writing came about, the people couldn't log into the Internet to find out how other people were doing it, so everyone did their own thing.