Sam,
I admire your poise in the face of hostility, but as DS says, we beat this horse to death a few weeks ago. I’m sure the thread is still around somewhere.
Have a look around.
It’ll be fun.
According to the Pope, a woman can be a saint, but not a priest.
NeedAHobby Asked “Ok, so here’s the challenge: present an explanation that is believable and hides the inherent circular logic required to create a plausible solution.”
How’s this- The alphabet isn’t in any particular order. The order has been placed on it through the centuries.
Then there was the kid who did so poorly in school that when asked to recite the alphabet, he began: " D, D minus, F…"
T’was I that asked the question a couple of weeks ago, so look for my name.
And the conclusion we eventually came to was that the Greek alphabet was possibly the earliest to have a particular order (and they were pretty good at keeping records so they most likely established an order for that purpose).
Maybe.
“So what you are telling me, Percy, is that something you have never seen is slightly less blue than something else that you have never seen.”
T’was I that asked the question a couple of weeks ago, so look for my name.
And the conclusion we eventually came to was that the Greek alphabet was possibly the earliest to have a particular order (and they were pretty good at keeping records so they most likely established an order for that purpose).
Maybe.
“So what you are telling me, Percy, is that something you have never seen is slightly less blue than something else that you have never seen.”
No, the Greeks got it from the Phoenicians (the Bible’s “Canaanites”). Before that stage, it was a syllabary, not an alphabet; I don’t know what, if any, order was inherited from the syllabary.
John W. Kennedy
“Compact is becoming contract; man only earns and pays.”
– Charles Williams
*Cristi: I remember the backwards alphabet song too. And hey, didja ever notice that the ABC song, “Twinkle Twinkle Little Star,” and “Baa Baa Black Sheep” are all the same tune?
No I did not figure that one out myself. I had help, from my daughter. She’s two. Good ear on that kid. *
My 3-year-old niece helped me:
A B C D E F G
How I wonder what you are
Up above… T U V
wubble-u X Y Z
I believe the Hebrew alphabet predates the Greek. And while I don’t have any scholarly evidence to back it up, I’ll argue that alphabetical sequences were probably passed along by religious scribes. Why? Because writing systems follow religion.
The Bible went from Israel to Greece. From Greece the Catholic Church took it to Rome and points west, while the Orthodox church took it to Constantinople and points north. Those points north include modern Russia, Bulgaria and Serbia, where the Cyrillic alphabet is used. So you’re left with the following alphabetical orders (hope this comes out right):
<pre>
Heb 'B GDHV Z&HTY KLMNS `PZKRST
Grk AB GDE ZETI KLMN XOP RSTUF H* O
Rom AB CDEFG H IJKLMN OP QRSTUVWX Y Z
Cyr ABVGDE JZ IJKLMN OP RSTUF H ZCS*‘Y’ EUA
Notes: Bolded H in Hebrew, Greek and Cyrillic is ch in “Bach.” Bolded T in Hebrew and Greek is th. Bolded Z in Hebrew and Cyrillic is ts. Bolded E, J, C, S, U, A in Cyrillic are ye, zh, ch in “church,” sh, yu, ya. * in Greek is ps; * in Cyrillic is shch. ’ in Hebrew and Cyrillic is unpronounced; ` in Hebrew has no English equivalent but is like a voiced glottal stop.</small>
The repeated sequences of letters is too much to ignore, especially when you look at writing as well as sound (e.g., Greek long E is written “H,” Greek and Cyrillic ch-as-in-“Bach” is written “X,” etc.). So the alphabet was probably developed way back in ancient Israel and modified only when new sounds needed to be accounted for.
I think it’s fair to say that the “alphabet song” tune came later.
Arrgh. Take 2:
<tt>
Heb 'B GDHV Z&HTY KLMNS `PZKRST
Grk AB GDE ZETI KLMN XOP RSTUF H* O
Rom A B CDEFG H IJKLMN OP QRSTUVWX Y Z
Cyr ABVGDE JZ IJKLMN OP  ; RSTUF H ZCS*‘Y’ EUA
</tt>
OK, third time’s charmed. And if a friendly sysop would like to come along and put this cleaned-up version in where it was supposed to go in the first place, I wouldn’t be at all opposed:
<font face=“Courier New, Courier”>
Heb 'B GDHV Z&HTY KLMNS `PZKRST
Grk AB GDE ZETI KLMN XOP RSTUF H* O
Rom AB CDEFG H IJKLMN OP QRSTUVWX Y Z
Cyr ABVGDE JZ IJKLMN OP RSTUF H ZCS*‘Y’ EUA
</font>
I can’t stand it.
<font face=“Courier New, Courier”>
Heb 'B GDHV ZHTY KLMNS `PZKRST
Grk AB GDE ZETI KLMN XOP RSTUF H* O
Rom AB CDEFG H IJKLMN OP QRSTUVWX Y Z
Cyr ABVGDE JZ IJKLMN OP RSTUF H ZCS*‘Y’ EUA
</font>
See http://www.optonline.com/plweb-cgi/fastweb?getdoc+view1+all002+4874+0++cyrillic for the Compton Encyclopedia entry that talks about slavic languages, and the development of the Cyrillic alphabet in the tenth century AD.
I thunk it was pretty well established that the first alphabet was the Phoenician, from which the others derived. Hence the similarity in order for the various early alphabets (Hebrew, Greek, etc, and plenny of dead ones, eventually leading into Latin and thence to our modern alphabets.)
Prior to alphabets, the symbol for a word was often the picture of the object (rather than the name of the object); hence a picture of an ox (an o with two horns) got turned sideways and evolved into a letter like Greek (lowercase) alpha – still basically a circle with two horns. And so down the line.
The question of whether the Phoenicians had an “order”, I don’t know, but I think so. (Take that for what it’s worth.) Once the order was set, of course, the derivative alphabets (Hebrew, Greek, Latin, etc) followed the same order.