# Who invented alphabetical order and why? **URL:** \ **Category:** Factual Questions\ **Created:** [August 4, 2002, 2:37pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/who-invented-alphabetical-order-and-why/122293 "2002-08-04T14:37:04Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 12\ **Page:** 1
**Author:** ![Turpentine](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/t/ecd19e/32.png) [@Turpentine](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Turpentine)\ **Post date:** [August 4, 2002, 2:37pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/who-invented-alphabetical-order-and-why/122293/1 "2002-08-04T14:37:04Z")
I was just reflecting upon the fact that “Before” comes after “After” alphabetically. They both come from Old English words- “Oefter” and “beforan” so they weren’t always mixed up alphabetically. The words are alphabetically in reverse order in French and German, too. Isn’t that strange? In my dictionary, it has the Arabic, Hebrew, Russian and Greek alphabets and they are all in order- and they all begin with something that sounds like “a” or “alif” or “aleph” so they must have similar origins. Who was it that decided that the symbols, the idiograms or the pictograms needed to be listed in some sort of order? When would that have use to anyone in ancient history except to look things up? Did heiroglyphics have some order to them? the falcon comes first, then the Eye of Horus, then a scarab and then a man with his arms in the Walk-Like-an-Egyptian pose? Weird. Who decided the order anyway? Why does A come first? That rabbi in Pi said something about the Hebrew alphabet being based on numbers and that Aleph meant 1. Maybe that has something to do with it. What about the Chinese alphabet? Aren’t there about 25,000 characters or something? Are they in some alphabetical order or are you just supposed to know them all? Are “before” and “after” in the right order? Mr. Kearse had a Chinese-English dictionary and I wondered how he looked up a Chinese word to get the English…there must be some order to the characters but I find it unfathomable. ---
**Author:** ![Hari\_Seldon](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/hari_seldon/32/5173_2.png) [@Hari\_Seldon](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Hari_Seldon)\ **Post date:** [August 4, 2002, 3:54pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/who-invented-alphabetical-order-and-why/122293/2 "2002-08-04T15:54:47Z")
Well, the one thing I am certain of is that aleph = 1, beth = 2, etc., came long after the order was determined. Most likely, people made lists of letters and had to put them in some order and some order became standardized over time. Then people began to use letters to denote numbers and it became natural to use the first letter for 1, the second for 2 and so on. That fixed the order for all times. I think the Greeks used the first nine for 1,…,9, the second nine for 10,…,90 and the third nine (with some fudging since there are not 27 Greek letters, at least not now) for 100,…,900. After that they punted. Anyway, zeta is #7 in the Greek alphabet and then the Romans borrowed the Greek alphabet, they dropped the zeta (having no Z sound, I guess they didn’t sleep) leaving a vacuum in the number system. Well we know that nature abhors a vacuum, so what they did was split the letter gamma into an unvoiced variant, which they left third and wrote as C and a voiced variant that they added a hook to and put in #7 spot. Later on they had borrowed so many Greek words that they decided they did need a Z after all and added it. But by then its place had been taken so they put it at the end. Meantime, there was a split at I/J and a four-way split of upsilon to produce U,V,W, and Y. Rather complicated and eventually the Romans invented their own numeration system, which we still use somewhat, although I cannot imagine why. Good for outlines and lists, I guess. ---
**Author:** ![Lodrain](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/l/c4cdca/32.png) [@Lodrain](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Lodrain)\ **Post date:** [August 4, 2002, 9:43pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/who-invented-alphabetical-order-and-why/122293/3 "2002-08-04T21:43:37Z")
The various alphabets used in Europe, the Middle East and north Africa have, for the most part, a common origin - the Phonecian alphabet, itself based on an earlier pictographic system. The ones I’m sure of are the Arabic, Cyrillic, Greek, Roman and Hebrew. Arabic and Hebrew are closer to each other historically, both generally leaving out vowels (except for the Arabic as it’s used for languages like Urdu and Farsi) and sharing similar orders and names for the letters - I think the two were derived directly from Phonecian, but I’m not sure. All have diverged enormously from each other, but all share basic ground traits, like the A-B, L-M-N groupings common to all. Now, I wait for the real language genii to blow in here and pelt me with stones while they correct my unavoidable grievous factual errors. ---
**Author:** ![Monty](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/monty/32/47_2.png) [@Monty](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Monty)\ **Post date:** [August 5, 2002, 12:32am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/who-invented-alphabetical-order-and-why/122293/4 "2002-08-05T00:32:54Z")
Lodrain: Yiddish uses Hebrew with vowels, IIRC. The other great European Jewish language, Ladino, I’ve no idea if it’s written with the Roman letters or the Hebrew. ---
**Author:** ![Lodrain](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/l/c4cdca/32.png) [@Lodrain](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Lodrain)\ **Post date:** [August 5, 2002, 3:03am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/who-invented-alphabetical-order-and-why/122293/5 "2002-08-05T03:03:17Z")
Oh. Consider me pelted. I think I meant to say that the Arabic and Hebrew alphabets _can_ indicate vowels, but most of the time, when writing in their native language, they normally don’t bother. The Arabic alphabet for other languages, like Urdu and Farsi, do indicate vowels fully and probably mandatorily, because neither language works like Arabic. Arabic has only three vowel sounds, you see. It’s pretty easy to guess which vowel is which in a word. Add the fact that Arabic works on consonant roots and shoves in vowels to specify meaning, and it’s pretty unambiguous. Example - _salaam_ and _Islam_ are the same root - ‘s-l-m’, but with a different vowel pattern. Since Urdu and Persian lack the consonant root system and have more vowels than just three, guessing is harder. So they indicate vowels. I presume it works that way in the Hebrew alphabet as not used by Hebrew as well. Sorry about the goof-up. To further answer the OP, ‘A’ (almost always pronounced as ‘ah’ in other languages) tends to come first in alphabets because ‘A’ is considered a sort of ‘mother’ sound - just open your mouth and let air past, and you get ‘A’. In the hiragana and katakana syllabaries used in Japanese, ‘A’ comes first, IIRC, but neither alphabet is based on Phonecian - hiragana is based on Chinese characters and I have no idea where katakana came from. Devanagari sort of works the same way, but Devanagari’s order runs, I think, as (K-Kh-G-Gh, C-Ch-J-Jh, T-Th-D-Dh, P-Ph-B-Bh, H-Y-V-Sh-S), at least in Sanskrit; I haven’t a clue about Hindi. Each letter is considered to have the consonant and an ‘A’ sound with it and there’s a special mark for syllables that end in consonants. Thus, the alphabet would be said as ‘ka’, ‘kha’, ‘ga’, ‘gha’, and so on. ‘A’ comes first in Devanagari, too. Little squiggles on top indicate other vowels, but they can also be free-standing letters if they begin a word. Devanagari was based on the Brahmi, of no relation to Phonecian either. Not every alphabet with ‘A’ as an initial sound is related. Now I duck and cover again. ---
**Author:** ![Monty](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/monty/32/47_2.png) [@Monty](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Monty)\ **Post date:** [August 5, 2002, 3:29am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/who-invented-alphabetical-order-and-why/122293/6 "2002-08-05T03:29:27Z")
I’ll have to disagree with you yet again, Lodrain. Let’s not project what we believe we know about our own languages onto other languages. The first vowel sound in Korean, for example, is _A_ (pronounced like the first a in aria), however the first sound in that particular alphabet is _K_ (name of the letter is formally _ki-ook_ but it’s usually called _ka_). And then there’s the Chinese syllabary which has the first sounds of Bo Po Mo Fo. ---
**Author:** ![cmkeller](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/cmkeller/32/118_2.png) [@cmkeller](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/cmkeller)\ **Post date:** [August 5, 2002, 5:24am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/who-invented-alphabetical-order-and-why/122293/7 "2002-08-05T05:24:51Z")
Monty: > [@](#): > > The other great European Jewish language, Ladino, I’ve no idea if it’s written with the Roman letters or the Hebrew. Ladino is written with Hebrew letters as Yiddish is. ---
**Author:** ![jovan](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/j/0ea827/32.png) [@jovan](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/jovan)\ **Post date:** [August 5, 2002, 6:12am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/who-invented-alphabetical-order-and-why/122293/8 "2002-08-05T06:12:09Z")
> [@](#): > > \*Originally posted by Turpentine \* > \*\*Mr. Kearse had a Chinese-English dictionary and I wondered how he looked up a Chinese word to get the English…there must be some order to the characters but I find it unfathomable. \*\* Chinese characters are organised by the number of brushstrokes. Each character is made up of smaller units, or radicals. The first step in finding a character is identifying the main radical. You then count the brushstrokes in that radical and in the rest of the character (the body). Say, the character for “poem”: the radical (speak) has 7 strokes\* and the body (temple) has 6 strokes, to find the character you’d first have to look up the speech radical section and then the 6-stroke body section. It sounds complicated but once you get used to it, it takes only marginally more time to look up a word. \*In traditional form. ---
**Author:** ![Monty](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/monty/32/47_2.png) [@Monty](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Monty)\ **Post date:** [August 5, 2002, 11:55am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/who-invented-alphabetical-order-and-why/122293/9 "2002-08-05T11:55:53Z")
Thanks, CMK! ---
**Author:** ![Monty](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/monty/32/47_2.png) [@Monty](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Monty)\ **Post date:** [August 5, 2002, 12:00pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/who-invented-alphabetical-order-and-why/122293/10 "2002-08-05T12:00:07Z")
jovan: What you describe is the traditional (going back a very long time) method of arranging characters. There’s a more sensible way which is described at [www.kanji.org](http://www.kanji.org). In that system, the SKIP (Simplified Kanji Indexing by Pattern), there’s only four major patterns that the character can fall into and from there it’s a matter of a few seconds to find the thing in the dictionary. ---
**Author:** ![jovan](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/j/0ea827/32.png) [@jovan](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/jovan)\ **Post date:** [August 5, 2002, 2:49pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/who-invented-alphabetical-order-and-why/122293/11 "2002-08-05T14:49:43Z")
SKIP is a good idea and in my experience is somewhat more efficient than the traditional method. However, the only dictionaries, to my knowledge, that use this method are Halpern’s. These are all Japanese-English tomes meant for English speakers. I’ve never, ever, seen SKIP used in any Kanji or Chinese dictionary meant for native users. ---
**Author:** ![jovan](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/j/0ea827/32.png) [@jovan](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/jovan)\ **Post date:** [August 5, 2002, 3:33pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/who-invented-alphabetical-order-and-why/122293/12 "2002-08-05T15:33:18Z")
And now getting back to the op… Phoenician script is actually derived from something known as _proto-canaanite_ writing. Around 1700 BCE, Sinai was invaded by Egypt, and it is believed that around that time Semitic tribes adopted the concept of writing from the Egyptians, this script is perhaps the first real ancestor to our modern alphabets. I found [a site](http://www.ancientscripts.com/protocan.html) that confirms what I remembered from college. (Complete with nice pictures…) > [@](#): > > Egyptian hieroglyphs already have phonetic signs (in addition to logograms), but the Sinaitic people did not adopt these phonetic signs. Instead, they randomly chose pictorial Egyptian glyphs (like ox-head, house, etc), where each sign stood for a consonant. How did they decide which sign get which consonant? A sign is a picture of an object, and the first consonant of the word for this object becomes the sound the sign represents. Note that the first letter, aleph, did not stand for the sound ‘A’ but for the glottal stop. What I find interesting is that Cherokees used a similar process when developing their syllabary; randomly giving phonetic values to roman letters. After some searching on the net, I found the following [here](http://victorian.fortunecity.com/vangogh/555/Spell/alfabet2.html): > [@](#): > > The earliest example of an abecedary (an ordered list of the a, b, g, d, variety) was found in the Syrian coastal city of Ugarit. However, instead of being written in some kind of West Semitic, Proto-Canaanite-derived form (shown in row 2 of Fig. 1), the clay tablet that recorded this abecedary was written in some kind of cuneiform. This cuneiform script was unrelated to any other kinds except only in the shape of its characters, and the total number of symbuls was 30, a good number for a (mostly) alphabetic script.Ê > > Whether the Ugaritic influenced the letter ordering of later West Semitic scripts, or vice-versa, is still an open question. In short, we’re not sure, maybe it was a mnemonic trick that got lost, maybe not.