Well? Why is abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz considered the definitive “alphabetical” order? Why don’t we arrange letters by their frequency of ocurrence instead? (then “e” would be first) Why THIS order and not THAT order, or any other order besides the one we use?
And who invented that damn tune you sing the alphabet to?
I forget who made the tune. It was either, Bach, or Brahm or some composer with a B name. The tune is just Twinkle Twinkle, Little Star if you haven’t noticed by now.
See, the alphabet is in that order BECAUSE of the song.
(apologies to Steven Wright or whoever)
The letter order must be arbitrary. Any order that “makes sense” now won’t do so in the future. For instance, letter frequency depends on spelling, and spelling gets screwed around with every so often under the guise of spelling reform.
Actually, I think it was Dr. Sean Kenniff from Survivor I.
This is just a WAG, but until the Romans created the Latin alphabet, most alphabets used letters and numbers interchangably. i.e. A=1, B=2, etc. Hebrew still does this. Don’t know about other languages. Since Hebrew, Greek, etc. have orders vaguely similar to the Latin alphabetical order, it is probably based on that system. In other words alphabetical order is alphabetical order because it’s actually numerical order.
It was actually Mozart. Twinkle Twinkle is his Theme and Ten Variations from Ah! Vous dirai-je, maman.
I posted this very question about 9 months ago whereupon I was told that someone had posted it a few months prior to that. Use the search function and you’ll find the old threads.
Well, the old threads talk a lot, but I don’t know that they provide a definitive answer:
My guess would be that the Phoenicians just got into the habit of ordering their writing characters in a certain way and all the derivative alphabets have followed that practice.
An Indian roommate I had in college told me that “alphabetical order” in Sanscrit was based on the shape of the mouth when pronouncing each sound, so similar letters (such as l and r, or hard g and k) would be grouped together. Presumably, this would remain a “logical system” so long as pronounciation remained relatively constant.
Interestingly, while the alphabet has been in its current order (more or less) for a very long time, it wasn’t until after the invention of moveable type that the idea of arranging things alphabetically really took off.