Who decided what letters go where in the alphabet? Im sure it was a group of literary scholars somewhere at sometime…but who? and when?:dubious:
I did.
Anyway, the Latin alphabet orginated in Rome, obviously, and was based, via the Etruscans, on the Greek alphabet. The Greek Alphabet was basede probably on the Semitic Phoenician alphabet, which itself was based on an older Semitic alphabet.
I meant the alphabet we use today who finally established it as THE alphabet
We use the Latin alphabet.
I know a couple of things…
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Z used to be sixth now it is last
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It would make more sense to put all the vowels together.
When they had discussions, in 1874, about whether to put the letters in some fixed order, they figured it might be best to just put them in alphabetical order… save a lot of time and energy.
The Roman alphabet included 23 letters: A B C D E F G H I K L M N O P Q R S T V X Y Z. It was formulated largely on the basis of a Western Greek alphabet as modified by Etruscan and other early Italian-peninsula usages. It spread with Rome across western and southern Europe and North Africa. J results from an originally-decorative flourish on an I – a script Roman-numeral 8: VIII in uncial, would often be rendered as viij. U and later W were adopted because V came to mean two different sounds, the vowel U and the glide W, and even later the fricative V sound.
And it’s not the alphabet, by a long shot – the alphabets of the Indian languages are still alive and well, half as many people write in the Arabic script as in the Roman, and the Greek alphabet is still in use for that language. Not to mention the systems used in eastern Asia. Also it might be worth noting that nearly every European language has its own alphabet – all those bizarre things you find in the upper-tier ASCII are standard usage for French, Swedish, Icelandic, German, Czech, etc. In Spanish, for example, there are 28 characters (though some occur only in foreign proper nouns) – what follows L in the Spanish alphabet is not M but LL, counting as a separate letter, and what follows N is Ñ. Perhaps a Francophone Doper can speak to what is done with the accented vowels and ç in French.
You are not the first to wonder this:
http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?s=&threadid=159439
http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?s=&threadid=168485
http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?s=&threadid=6482
Wasn’t it Stephen Wright who suggested it was because of that song?
Zeldar - yes, as discussed in the links I posted.
It all stems with the Phoenecian alphabet. No one knows why they settled on the order they did, but it was very catchy and all alphabets derived from this alphabet share some basic similarities in order and letter names. For a good example, see the cluster ‘L’, ‘M’, ‘N’, which is common to Arabic, Cyrillic and Roman; alphabets all derived from Phoenecian in some way or another.
[geekiness]
I, for one, like the Devanagari order. If we put the Roman alphabet in that scheme, it might look something like this:
a i y u e o k q c x g t d n p f b m j r l v w s z h
Of course, we have all those extraneous letters (‘k’, ‘c’ and ‘q’) and letters that represent more than one sound (‘x’–where ‘ks’ would be understandable), none of which Devanagari has, so I had to get creative. Oh, and I based the letters on their original Latin sound values, which is why ‘j’ is not between ‘g’ and ‘t’–I counted it as the ‘y’ sound in ‘yet’, not the ‘j’ in ‘jet’.
[/geekiness]
As an aside: ñ started out as nn. With the flowery script during medieval times, those crazy monks started doing things to that combination, presumably because it was boring to write identical consonants consecutively. In doing so, the second n migrated and ended up on top of the first. It’s not believed that this gave birth to the m.
There are virtually no words in Spanish, startning with Ñ, since not many words start with Nn, ñ-way. Why this didn’t happen to rr, or LL, I’m not sure.
When I studied French, we treated the alphabet exactly like the one we use in English. The accents are ignored when it comes to alphabetical order, even in a French dictionary I have (not a French-English dictionary, this one is published in France with French definitions). Also, I learned that when writing/Typing in caps, the accents are omitted.
Check out this nifty alphabet site to see how the various alphabets evolved.
Someone correct me if I’m wrong, but I believe that a true alphabet originated only once (probably w/ the Phonecians) and that all otter true alphabets derive from that one invention. There are other forms of non-pictogram writing, but they are all syllabaries, not alphabets. An example of a syllabary would be the Kana in Japanese, where each symbol represents a syllable, not an individual letter (ka, ki, ku, ke, ko; etc.).
Hebrew Alephbet, in English equivalents, would look something like this:
A B G D H V Z Ch T Y K L M N A S P Ts Q R Sh T
Aleph
Bet/Vet
Gimmel
Dalet
Hay
Vav
Zayin
Chet
Tet
Yud
Caf/Chaf
Lamed
Mem
Nun
Ayin
Samech
Pay/Fay
Tzadi
Koof
Shin/Sin
Tav
Note the similarities between Aleph, Bet, Gimmel, Dalet, and the greet Alpha, Beta, Gamma, Delta. They are believed to have very similar roots in the Phonetian Alphabet.
Also, not that LMN, followed shortly by P are also found in the Hebrew alephbet. The letter order is very old in its establishment, as they letters are traditionally used in counting.
No direct, useful info, but some fun side info. 
The Phoenician alphabet didn’t just spring fully formed out of nowhere, you know.
It was based on the Sinaitic inscriptions, which was apparently the invention of Semitic workers employed by Egyptians.
The Sinaitic writing got its start by these Semitic people in the Sinai adopting a few Egyptian hieroglyphs for their phonetic value, simplifying their shape somewhat, and using them to write consonantal sounds.
The idea spread through the Levant; Canaanites and what have you in the area learned how to write this way. It became known as the Phoenician alphabet because the Phoenician people were seafarers and traders, in contact with foreign lands, so they were the best known people in the area to foreigners.
The Semitic alphabet in the order now known (e.g. the Hebrew alphabet) was found inscribed on a staircase in Canaan something like 1100 BC (caveat: writing from memory, would need to verify it from a book in the public library which is closed at this hour. Will check it when I get a chance). So the traditional alphabetical order goes back at least that far.
I went to the library today and found the answer.
“An alphabet which may well have been the work of a schoolboy has been found scratched into the soft limestone steps of the temple in Lachish, dated about the end of the ninth century [BC]. It is written in the conventional order we still use: Aleph, Beth, Gimel, Daleth, He.”
—Donald Jackson, The Story of Writing (New York: Taplinger, 1981), p. 30.
The margin illustration in the book showed a reproduction of this inscription. The first five letters of the recognizably Phoenician alphabet. So we know the conventional alphabetical order goes back to at least 900 BC, but it may be much older.
Where did thorn, eth and eng fit in in the grand scheme of things? If I was singing the Old English alphabet, where would thorn and eth be placed?
There is no “upper-tier ASCII”. ASCII is only 256 characters and includes no accented characters. What you’re thinking of is ISO-8859-1 (“Latin-1”) or ISO-8859-15 (Latin-1 with Euro).
UnuMondo