Who decided what order the alphabet should be in?
Let me quote from Jared Diamond’s Guns, Germs and Steel:
“Starting around 1700 B.C. Semites familiar with Egyptian heiroglypgs did begin to experiment. <snip> The second [innovation] was to help memorize the alphabet by placing the letters in a fixed sequence and giving them easy-to-remember names. <snip> the Semitic names did possess meaning in Semitic languages: they were the words for familiar objects (aleph=ox, beth=house, gimel=camel, daleth=door, and so on).”
As many have said before about this book - a fascinating read.
We did this topic a while ago.
Essentially, the answer to this question is lost in the mist of time. The English alphabet is of course a variant of the Roman alphabet. This alphabet is adapted from the Etruscans who adapted it from the Greeks. The Greeks themselves having adapted their alphabet from the Phoenicians. The original ancestor of all these is the proto-canaanite alphabet.
The oldest example of an alphabet ordered according to the aleph-beth-gimmel / alpha-beta-gamma scheme dates to about 1300 bce. (See links in thread above.) It might have originally been a mnemonic trick, but nothing is sure.
The Etruscans changed the Greek gamma, for a symbol denoting the unvoiced /k/ sound, which was to become the letter C. Hence A, B, C.
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Not me. I ordered the ham and cheese on rye.
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The King of the Alphabet.
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Nobody orders the Alphabet around!!! NOBODY!!
That’s all I’ve got…
I heard it was ordered from a Ronco infomercial for 3 easy payments of 19.99, or free with a Showtime “set it and forget it” oven.
If you act now, you can get a case for your alphabet at no additional charge. Consider it our gift.
In yet another thread on this subject, one I can no longer find, I posted a long quote from Language Visible: Unraveling the Mystery of the Alphabet from A to Z, by David Sacks.
It said in essence that the alphabet just sorta happened and that there is no evidence of a deliberate ordering, even in the beginning. But all later alphabets are copies of that first proto-alphabet (which is a newly discovered text earlier than any previous ones, circa 2000BCE) and they have kept the same order, with a few tweaks and additions.