and how long has it been in the present order?
Because that’s the way the song goes. It wouldn’t make sence, otherwise. 
From hurricane names, of course.
Or sense, even. :dubious:
Our “Latin” alphabet has been in essentially the same order as far back as we can trace its ancestors. We don’t know why they put it in that order, but nobody has bothered to change it.
This link has a very good visual summary of the evolution of the alphabet.
Thanks, now I’ll have that damn song stuck in my head for hours.
Consider yourself lucky, crowmanyclouds. Whenever my students try to recall the spelling of a word, they sing that song. So, I’m stuck hearing that thing all day every day!
Shalmanese: That’s a pretty cool site, good animation.
The Roman and Greek alphabet orders are both based on the ancient Semitic script, one version of which is the Phoenician in Shalmanese’s example, the order that is still used in Hebrew. I read in a history of the alphabet that the earliest attestation for this specific order was carved on a stone staircase excavated in Israel, dated to about 1000 BC.
So the basic ABCD… pattern is probably at least 3,000 years old. I haven’t heard any cogent theories as to why ancient scribes chose that particular order.
The original Semitic alphabet ended with T. The following U and X were added at the end by the Greeks along with a bunch of other letters the Greeks invented. The Greek letter upsilon was originally a variant form of Archaic Greek digamma, derived from Semitic waw, which had the value of w. But digamma and the sound of w became obsolete in classical Greek. The shape of digamma survived in Etruscan as the letter F.
The Romans got their alphabet from the Etruscans. The Etruscans may have brought it with them from western Asia Minor, just as the Greeks learned the Semitic alphabet from trade within their early colonies in western Asia Minor. The Etruscan alphabet was of course basically similar to the Archaic Greek. The Roman alphabet at first only went up to X. They added Y and Z after they began learning Greek, in order to write Greek loanwords.
In ancient Roman, the letter V stood for either a vowel sound /u/ or a semiconsonant /w/ sound. The rounded letter U originated in the 9th century as a Carolingian uncial form of V. Until sometime in the Renaissance, both forms were still used interchangeably, with the rounded u for both sounds in lowercase and the pointy V for both in uppercase. You might see loue for love. I think it was late in the Renaissance or thereafter when printers decided to make an uppercase U and specialize the pointy V for the /v/ consonant sound and the rounded U for the /u/ vowel sound. W was added by Germanic languages before V and U became graphically differentiated, so that’s why we still call it “double U” even though it’s pointy.
J originated as an elongated variant of I. It was the last letter added to our modern alphabet order to make a total of 26. J wasn’t fully accepted as a separate letter in its own right until the early 19th century. Washingon, DC has no J street, probably for that reason. Pierre L’Enfant hadn’t been raised to think of J as a separate letter.
The police are responsible for the order its in. It used to go from Z to A.
Seems noone at traffic stops, drunk or sober, could manage to say it the old way.
What, you mean Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star?
(d’ja ever notice that?)
If you’re very interested in the history of our alphabet, I recommend Letter Perfect by David Sacks.
YOU ARE EEEVIIILLL
Baa, Baa, Black Sheep, Have you any wool?
…diverges on the sixth note, the way I learned the tunes.
It was first laid out as:
vexbawdcrunzyshitlqokjpgfm
They stood back, looked at… I dunno, just didn’t seem right.
You must not have a 2 year old at home. I’ve had that song stuck in my head for months, along with several Wiggles songs and the Higglytown heroes song (from Playhouse Disney). Welcome to my world.
I’m gonna put on some AC/DC to try (unsuccessfully as always, I’m sure) to clear it out of my head.
Dear Mr. President,
There are too many letters nowadays. Please eliminate three.
P.S. I am not a crackpot.
Let’s use this one instead! But what tune should we use?
I thought “alimeno” was a letter because of that song. Right before ‘p’.
Look at the Sidney Harris cartoon “The Alphabet in Alphabetical Order” for a different way.
I can’t find the actual cartoon online (although you can order a T-shirt of it), but here’s tyhe essential joke at the top of this PDF file: