Just wondering.
Since the Latin alphabet is just a slightly modified version of the Greek, whose first letter is alpha and the Greek is clearly borrowed from Hebrew (or some other Semitic language) whose first letter is aleph (and the first letter of Arabic is alif) it seems awfully unlikely that anything but A was ever the first letter in Latin. On the other hand, in Greek and Hebrew a letter with the sound of Z was something like the seventh letter and so was probably the same in very early versions of Latin. They dropped it and subbed digamma = F to keep the number system, A = 1, B =2,… on keel before they adopted roman numerals. Initially there was no voiced sibilant in Latin, but after they had borrowed a zillion Greek words, they found they needed it after all and tacked it on to the end.
I think Greek is directly from Phoenician, the OG of alphabets? Their first letter was alf, the equivalent of A*, and looks like an Anarchist A rotated -90 degrees and without the circle.
Related: many languages that use accents don’t consider them a separate letter. In French, “a” and “à” are the same letter as far as they’re concerned. But some languages, like the Scandinavian languages, consider it a separate letter, and put it at the end of the alphabet. In the Dano-Norwegian alphabet, the alphabet goes A, B, C, … Z, Æ, Ø, Å for 29 letters. So a form of “A” is at the end. Swedish is Å, Ä, Ö, although the two are mostly the same letters/sounds in different forms and orders.
*I am not quite sure if they put them in a certain order or if it’s a modern thing.
Here’s a relevant Straight Dope article.. It looks like A / alpha / aleph / whatever has been first in the alphabet since Ugaritic cuneiform in the 14th centrury BC.
So if A has always been first, why did the other letters shift around a lot? If “alphabetical order” wasn’t so important over the centuries, why was “A is first” worth holding onto?
They didn’t, really. At least not from Greek to the version of the Latin alphabet used in English, anyway.
With a couple exceptions (Z, the Y variation of Upsilon (but not the U variation), the G variation of Gamma (but not the C variation)) Latin letters derived from Greek letters are in the same relative place as their Greek ancestors, and once new variants of the Latin letters entered the alphabet, mostly they’ve stayed in the same place, mostly next to the letter they developed from (U and V apparently traded places at one point not long after they diverged, but the pair’s been consistently in the same place, and W stayed next to them when it came along). (Can’t speak to variations on the Latin alphabet that have more letters than the English one, I’m afraid.)
It looks like there was more shifting from Greek to Latin than there really was, since a bunch of Greek letters have no Latin equivalents, and a couple Latin letters come from non-standard Greek letters, and Z getting moved from after E to the end of the alphabet is a very noticeable change. (Omega, FTR, has no Latin equivalent, O derives from Omicron. If we kept the Greek order, ‘A to Z’ wouldn’t be ‘A to O’, it’d be ‘A to X’.)
I don’t believe this is true. Zeta was and is the 6th letter of the Greek alphabet, but was, I believe always used for 7. The Greeks already used Digamma (which looked like an F) for their number 6, so the Romans didn’t substitute it in. It likely, however, owes it’s place in the Latin alphabet after E to this numbering system. It’s the G that the Romans added after Digamma that subbed for the Zeta. And this may be why it went there rather than right after C. The other Latin splits I -> I,J U -> U,V,W were kept next to each other. (Though W was a post-Latin addition, I’m pretty sure.)
The old version of the Spanish alphabet went:
a b c ch d e f g h i j k l ll m n ñ o p q r (rr) s t u v w x y z
Some people would recite the rr and some wouldn’t; it never had its own dictionary heading because it never exists at the start of a word (when the phoneme it represents does, it’s represented by r).
The digraphs aren’t considered letters any more and the tilded vowels aren’t considered letters; AFAIK they never have. Ch, ll and ñ represent different phonemes than their closest relatives; tildes on vowels are a way to mark stress but you can have an untilded stressed vowel and the phoneme is the same whether the vowel is in the stressed syllable or not.
Are you sure there are tilded vowels in Spanish, that is, letters like ã or õ? I thought that was only in Portuguese.
Jesus not again…
If I call the ´ an accent, I get people telling me that an accent is a variation in how people speak. If I call it a tilde, which I’ve had monolingual Anglos call it damnit, then I get people telling me it’s the squiggly line. If I call it a diacritic mark, people either don’t even know what the fuck I’m talking about or tell me that since Spanish only has one* I should just call it a tilde/accent.
In any case I meant ÁÉÍÓÚáéíóú; there’s also ü and it’s also not considered a separate letter (there are other cases of vowels with umlauts in older documents, but in modern Spanish and outside of metal groups names, only ü).
- untrue
And then Haagen Dasz was born.
I’ve also had people telling me the proper name for ´ is accent aigu… which it is. In French 
Hello,
coming to apologize for being a bitch with the ´ thing.
Sorry,
Nava
And in English, it’s an acute accent. So why don’t you just call it that when writing English. If people don’t understand, then it’s their problem for being ignorant. Calling it a tilde is incorrect.
Since we’re talking about the order of letters, does anyone know why K is where it is in the Latin alphabet? Latin didn’t use the K; C was used for that sound. I imagine some Latin writers may have used a kappa when transcribing Greek, but otherwise Latin had no use for the letter. Yet there it is in most Latin-derived alphabets in the same place it was in the Greek alphabet. How did this happen?
I didn’t realize I was opening up a can of worms here. Sorry about that. But, in agreement with the others, I would call ´ an acute accent. The symbol ¨ is called a dieresis, or an umlaut, or if you want to be French ( ::dodges thrown object:: ), a tréma.
(Although now that I’ve looked it up, ´ can also be known as a tilde in Spanish. That is probably the origin of all the confusion.)
K was used in older Latin mostly in words beginning ka and then mostly replaced by C. The one word in classical Latin I recall still using a K was kalends which was the first day of the month from which we derive calendar.