I think we should change the alphabet to go along with the QWERTY format. It would be a huge change, but more beneficial for future beings? Any thoughts?
The order of the alphabet is entirely arbitrary. You may reorder any way you like. Why would reordering to QWERTY be beneficial?
No. It wouldn’t help people learn to type, if that’s your implication.
I’d like to counterpropose the AZERTY alphabet.
Given that every language, and sometimes every country, has its own keyboard layout (including non-qwerty ones), there’s no point in obsoleting the tons of dictionaries and encyclopedies already printed.
I’d like to add symbols for SH, TH, and CH, along with extra vowels to represent long and short pronunciations (i.e. CAT vs CAKE, HOP vs HOPE).
And a pony.
Duplicate letters that represent the same sounds are ridiculous. So K should be used every time we need a hard C, and S when we need a soft C. That leaves C free for the SH sound. X for KS or Z sounds is silly, so X can go back to its old role of the CH sound. Q is just useless, but we could use it for some obscure phoneme like the ZH in azure. Or get rid of it. We’d bring back Thorn (Þ and þ) for hard TH and and Edh (Ð and ð) for soft TH.
Vowels are easy, just put a hat on them.
Before we alphabetize by keyboard, we should change the keyboard to something more sensible like Dvorak.
But I thought there were like thirteen vowel sounds in english, or something? Including ones that aren’t tied to specific letters, like ‘uh’.
If we’re going to reorder the alphabet, it would make more sense to do so on a phonetic system – vowels first, voiced consonants paired with their voiceless analogues (“T” right after “D”), etc. Or something like that.
See the organization of the International Phonetic Alphabet used by linguists.
a, e, i, o, u, y, á, é, í, ó, ú, ý, ä, ë, ï, ö, ü, ÿ.
There we go, 18 vowels. Assign hats to phonemes at random, just like we already do.
Heretic! Colemak is clearly the better layout.
But seriously, QWERTY works for me since it’s familiar. I don’t need to type at light speed since for all serious typing I spend much more time thinking anyway.
Been debunked. By Cecil.
" *But by then, the story goes, people were used to the QWERTY keyboard and we’ve been stuck with it ever since, even in the face of allegedly superior alternatives such as the Dvorak keyboard. Advocates say research proves the Dvorak is easy to learn and makes typing faster and more accurate. But it’s never made much headway because of the crushing power of standards, even stupid ones.
Baloney, say the authors of the article you enclose, S.J. Liebowitz and Stephen Margolis. They point out that (1) the research demonstrating the superiority of the Dvorak keyboard is sparse and methodologically suspect; (2) a sizable body of work suggests that in fact the Dvorak offers little practical advantage over the QWERTY; (3) at least one study indicates that placing commonly used keys far apart, as with the QWERTY, actually speeds typing, since you frequently alternate hands; and (4) the QWERTY keyboard did not become a standard overnight but beat out several competing keyboards over a period of years. Thus it may be fairly said to represent the considered choice of the marketplace. "
*
ASCII encoding pretty much means the alphabet order will never change.
Are you sure it’s entirely arbitrary? Presumably the order chosen stems from some specific origin, and had a motivation of some kind.
Arbitrary? Nonsense. It’s in alphabetical order.
OK, seriously, Cecil has addressed the reason: Why is the alphabet in alphabetical order? - The Straight Dope
Right. Not necessarily arbitrary, but as Cecil stated, there’s no real reason for it to have to be in that order.
Better change the keyboard layout than the alphabet order. In any case keyboards will probably go extinct in a century or two.
I don’t care whether you change the alphabet . . . so long as it still rhymes.
Yes, but which melody do we sing it to? I much prefer Sesame Street’s Monsterpiece Theater theme…
ABCDE
CDEFG
HIJK
LMNNNNOP
QRSTU
RSTUV
TUVandWXYZ
aandAYYYBEEECEEE…
Actually, on looking for YouTube videos to illustrate this, I found out that it wasn’t the Monsterpiece Theater theme. Although I could swear I remember it as that.