I got this reference from the video (linked) where he’s talking about the differences between Mandarin and Japanese, mainly involving 漢字 which is present in both languages but there are actual differences (besides simplified or traditional characters) associated with either printed text and handwritten formats, kind of like this:
I mean, it’s literally the same word in both languages but they’re different if you look closely. No wonder why people mistake Japanese for CHINESE! It’s infuritating when you know what Kanji actually looks like and how it’s pronounced. The issue is that characters for the most part inherit same unicode between Japanese & Mandarin.
Mainly talking about word processors and how Kanji / Hanzi is encoded onto computers, what ends up happening is that they overlap depending on the font used (as Japanese has it’s own font set while Mandarin uses a completely different one). Look at it like this, which language is the “A” looking letter from (shown below):
Both use the same font, but have the stroke on top facing different directions indicating they are from different languages. However if one doesn’t pay close attention to the letters present within a word, they can face confusion over which language it belongs to. That’s the kind of crap happens when discussing Kanji or Hanzi.
For example, the unicode for 軍 is U+8ECD which is present in both Japanese and Mandarin. Basically, the same as to why the letter “Í” (U+CD) appears in multiple languages like Spanish, Portuguese, Icelandic, Hungarian, Czech all inherit unicode U+CD so you may get mixed results in one of those languages.
If the question is whether the Latin languages use letters differently: yes, every language is different?
I can speak for English, Spanish, and French. English is a bastard language with more exceptions than rules, as we all know. Spanish mostly uses accents as a pronunciation guide with some exceptions, whereas French accents change the letter sound more consistently. Both can change the meaning. French uses ç but not Spanish, and Spanish uses ñ exclusively. French is much more contextual.
Sp: “Si llego a tiempo” (if I arrive in time) vs “Sí, llegó a tiempo” (yes, he arrived in time). Same general sound, different emphasis.
Fr: «Bon mais sale» (good but dirty) vs «bon maïs salé» (good salted corn). Wildly different sounds and even syllable counts.
I must say that Ç is present in both Catalan and Portuguese.
I feel like, to add on it, letter combinations also yield wildly different sounds in different languages. For instance, “ll” in English sounds like an “l” while in Spanish it sounds like a “y”.
That is called yeismo and is caracteristic of some dialects, the traditional pronunciation is /ʎ/,
In French, «queue» rhymes with euh, «clown» rhymes with spoon, and «comment» sounds like c’mon. The Spanish ñ is closest to the French gn («mignon») and English ny/ni (“canyon”, “onion”). Don’t get me started on the R sounds.