It’s also traditional to alphabetize numbers as if they were spelled out, but that’s pretty rare nowadays because of computer sorting.
Ah, thanks…I was misinformed.
Huh. Didn’t know that had a name. The old-school one I expect Giles is talking about is iroha.
Numbers often go before letters, unless you’re Apple’s iPod interface, in which case they go at the end.
:o
Yeah. Greek gematria is numbered pretty much according to the Greek alphabetical order, forming discrepancies with the original Hebrew numerical values. But Arabic gematria follows the Hebrew alphabetical order and numerical values exactly. Then there are the 6 more letters in Arabic, which actually makes it work better, because they take the range of values up to 1,000 whereas Hebrew only has enough letters to make it up to 400:
1 ’
2 b
3 g / j
4 d
5 h
6 v / w
7 z
8 ḥ
9 ṭ
10 y
20 k
30 l
40 m
50 n
60 s
70 ‘
80 p / f
90 ṣ
100 q
200 r
300 sh
400 t
500 th
600 kh
700 dh
800 ḍ
900 ẓ
1000 gh
So my name in Hebrew is יוחנה (y v ḥ n h), which gives a numerical total of 79.
But in Greek I’m Ίωάννα, which adds up to 912.
I just posted this in another thread about languages, but I figure it’ll be handy here also. here is a site with virtual keyboards for a number of languages. Some of the keyboards require you to change your browser’s encoding to display the keybarod and the typed characters.
Johannah: At first, I thought this question might be a bit deviant. Then I remembered this is the SDMB after all. Are there any common names (either singly or boy-girl combination as in a couple) where the numeric value of the letters sums to 69?
Arabic, Hebrew, Greek and Roman alphabets all derive from the same source, so that’s not too surprising.
Kind of cheating, because it’s not a Hebrew name, but a woman named Tess (טס) could qualify. Or a man named Timmy (טימי), but that’s a nickname already, so maybe it’s stretching it 
Other names that equal 69:
Nadia
Johnny
Dina
Dante
(Google is my friend)
It should be pointed out that different languages that use the Latin alphabet have different ways of alphabetizing. For example, French simply ignores diacritics for the purposes of alphabetizing, except (apparently) that if two words are exactly the same except for diacritics, the diacritics come after: cote, côte, côté, but then coteau.
Spanish ignores most diacritics, but it treats ñ as a separate letter alphabetized after n (ch, ll, and rr also used to be treated as separate letters but aren’t anymore.)
Swedish treats its vowels with diacritics å ä ö as separate letters and places them at the end of the alphabet, as does Norwegian with Æ Ø Å.
Esperanto treats its letters with diacritics as separate letters that follow the equivalent diacritic-less letters: ĉ ĝ ĥ ĵ ŝ ŭ. It refers to them with their own names (ĉ is called ĉo, not c-ĉapelo, for example, although ŭ is sometimes called u-hoko).
Finally, English itself used to alphabetize i and j together, as well as u and v; in Johnson’s dictionary, for example, jeweler would come before if.
For at least one non-Latin alphabet, it can simply be different countries that use the same language and the same writing system order the letters and even name them differently.
And I just remembered that for English-speaking countries, there’s not even a universal consensus on the name for one of the letters.
As does Finnish with ä, ö. Which seems quite bizarre to me, and took me the longest time to get used to when using Finnish dictionaries.
I didn’t have to click to know what the link went to!
Danish is the same as Norwegian, a legacy of a united kingdom (Norway was also part of Sweden, but not for long enough, it seems.)
J is the last letter to be added to the alphabet. It didn’t really gain status as a letter in its own right until circa 1800. Before that, it was treated as a variant of I. In Italian, J is still called “long i.”
And of course in French, Spanish, and a couple of other languages, it’s called “Greek I” (in French i grec), and in German it’s called Ypsilon.
Aw dammit, this is what happens when I post after only one cup of coffee. Obviously everything I said there is about Y, not J. Thinko, sorry.