The fact is, languages change like this all the time. And sometimes not all the speakers go along with changes, for various reasons, and then the development sp

The fact is, languages change like this all the time. And sometimes not all the speakers go along with changes, for various reasons, and then the development splits. However, not always does this result in a new language (science uses cross-understandability as a criterion, outside of science it's... more complicated) Just look at English: the current ortography is so weird because it got frozen before the language underwent a drastic change (the Great Vowel shift). German changed radically too: during the High German consonant shift, many of the differences that set it apart from English and Dutch happened: t got changed to s, p got changed to pf and so on. Vowel shifts happened too: the Early New German diphtongization changed many long vowel sounds. For example: * "latin" to "latein" (the "i" in Latin is like "ee" in English "see", the "ei" like English "eye"), * "niuw" (almost like English "new") to "neu" ("eu" like "oy" in English "boy"), or * "mus" to "maus" ("u" as "oo" in English "good", "maus" exactl% like the English word "mouse"). The last example is especially interesting because the Great Vowel shift and the Early New High German diphtongization started almost a continent apart and 800 years after the languages split, but had the same result.