This is a question to the article, Why is the alphabet in alphabetical order?
specifically:
I had always thought that Xi is where we get the ‘ks’ sound and that the glyph for Chi is only inherited as our letter ‘X’ but is otherwise unrelated… am I wrong here?
Neither English nor Latin nor Etruscan is descended from Greek, so it is meaningless to say that “we get the ‘ks’ sound” from any Greek letter at all.
As to the history of the alphabet, itself, ancient Greek had many dialects, which differed rather more than English speakers think of “dialects” as differing. In the western dialect that the Etruscans got the alphabet from, chi was pronounced “ks” at the time.
On this whole subject, see the très kewl animations at http://www.wam.umd.edu/~rfradkin/alphapage.html
Excellent web site! I just wasted way too much time playing with the animations.
Very cool.
I’m more intrigued by the fact that the alphabet isn’t in alphabetical order. By my reckoning, the English alphabet would be alphabetized as follows: Aitch (h), Ar ®, Bee (b), Cue (q), Dee (d), Double-you (w), Eee (e), Eff (f), Eh (a), Ell (l), Em (m), En (n), Ess (s), Ex (x), Eye (I), Gee (g), Jay (j), Owe (o), Pee §, Quay (k), See ©, Tee (t), Vee (v), Why (y), You (u), Zee (z). I don’t know why thiw should be so.
that makes sense. i’d forgotten that the different greek dialects had such great variance in pronounciation. thanks for the insight!
By the way, have we any medievalists here? Was there any traditional ordering for thorn (Þ, þ), eth (Ð, ð), ash (Æ, æ), wynn (Ƿ, ƿ), and yogh (Ȝ, ȝ)?
Because each language pronounces its letters in a different fashion, so you would have a separate alphabetization for each.
For example, Spanish:
A: a
B: be
C: ce
CH: che
D: de
E: e
F: efe
G: ge
H: hache
I: i
J: jota
K: ka
L: ele
LL: elle
M: eme
N: ene
Ñ: eñe
O: o
P: pe
Q: cu
R: ere
S: ese
T: te
U: u
V: ve
W: doble u
X: equis
Y: i griega
Z: zeta
You’ve all got it wrong. The order of the alphabet is derived from that song. You know, the one that goes “A B C D E F G…”
I… I really hope you’re joking.
That’s damned funny (recursion alert!)
I am about to write a BA Thesis in linguistics and am looking for lots of stuff on the Internet. And I think that this thing about the alphabetical order is quite interesting. However, when I googled the same (thread) question I found this page first of all:
So, who is this Cecile that wrote the answere and where did she get these information from? Perhaps she has got some book recommendations …
@ Hahathor: the idea of a different alphabetical order for the English language is pretty interesting. Where did you get that from?
Um. Cecil Adams is the author of the Straight Dope columns, upon which this website is based. He writes a newspaper column, syndicated among many alternate newspapers throughout the US. By the nature of the newspaper column, there’s not room to provide sources, so he generally doesn’t. (In fact, he dictates most columns without sources because he’s a genius, and then staff spend lots of time doing research to back up and verify what he’s said.)
However, other posters here may have recommendations for you.
Letters Å, Ä and Ö are placed last in Finnish and Swedish alphabet, but in German Ä is mixed with A and Ö with O and Ü ( which F&S don’t have ) with U, so the order isn’t really that fixed ( maybe in German they are all ‘umlaut’ and really not same letters as in F&S ). Also V and W used to be mixed in Finnish and Swedish dictionaries.
Then again in Finnish language there isn’t letters B, C, F, Q, W, X, Z and Å.
Ouch, I just realized this is a zombie thread…
Sometimes (but not always) German alphabetizes “ä” as equal to “ae”, “ö” as equal to “oe”, and “ü” as equal to “ue”. There are other mysteries. For example, English usually alphabetizes space before “a”, but US telephone directories alphabetize it after “z”, while some others treat spaces as nullities.
One of the things I like about the Greek alphabet is that every letter starts with itself. So they wouldn’t have this issue.
According to your system, the alphabetical order of the letters should be: Bee (b), Quay (k), Dee (d), Double-you (w), Why (y), Eh (a), Eee (e), Eff (f), Ell (l), Em (m), En (n), Ess (s), Ex (x), Eye (I), Ar (r), Aitch (h), See (c), Gee (g), Jay (j), Owe (o), Pee (p), Cue (q), Tee (t), Vee (v), You (u), Zee (z).
As a finn I’d like to comment here. We can nitpick about what is finnish and what’s not, but the ethymological dictionary of finnish language tells us that more than 90% of words we use in everyday language are loans.
So B is found in in “bisse” (beer), F is found in “finni” (zit) and Z is found in “zetaa” (sleep).
What comes to others: C is translittered to K as in “Kokis” (Coke) or S as in “shekki” (check), Q is translittered to KV as in “kveekari” (quacker), W is actually used in names but it’s pronounced just like V and all loan words substitute V, X is always translittered to KS as in “taksi” (taxi) and finally Å is in written finnish just fancy way to write O as in “Ååtatkå?” (Will you wait?), which implies that the speaker is a finnish-swede speaking finnish.
As all those ‘foreign’ characters can exist in name in written finnish alpahebetization follows the anglosaxon norm with the following execeptions: V and W are not differentiated and Å, Ä, and Ö are added into the end.
This causes problems in spreadsheet and database programs: You want to nationalize them so that you can alphabetize those Ä’s and Ö’s correctly but you don’t want to because you want to alpahabetize V and W separately.
Btw. The shortest entry in Helsinki phonebook used to be Å Bo.
Then two more nitpicks:
1, Of course all those characters from A to Z and Å, Ä and Ö included are part of finnish language as in finnish language they are the words that represent themselves. So if someone says that Q is not in any finnish word then she is wrong as “Q” is the finnish name of the lettter Q.
Nobody knows how the order of the alphabet arose. It may have simply started with a popular primer (“See Abuwtiyuw Run”). It goes back at least 3400 years. There have been various small changes as it evolved from Ugaritic to Phoenician to Greek to Etruscan to Archaic Latin to Classical and Medieval Latin to the various modern European alphabets, but the origins are nearly prehistoric.
So the story that my father told me about how the letters were arranged in the chronological order that they were invented, probably not true, eh? 