Why is the alphabet ordered the way it is?

[bibliophage]

@Johanna

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.

The oldest ordering of the alphabet I know of is on a clay tablet inscribed in Ugaritic, a Semitic language written in cuneiform. It dates to about 1300 B.C. and was probably used for teaching purposes. The ordering of the letters in Ugaritic was essentially the same as in related languages like Hebrew and Phoenician, despite the two very different writing systems.

[Crandolph]

Well, Soupy Sales had a “Backwards Alphabet” song that ‘worked’ if people are looking for alternatives, although it’d take me quite some time to get it down.

It’s probably the first thing I’ve searched for on the internet that hasn’t had a worthwhile link, sorry…

[Exapno_Mapcase]

@Speaker for the Dead

If you’re very interested in the history of our alphabet, I recommend Letter Perfect by David Sacks.

Thanks for that link. It was the book I was thinking of when I posted, but I couldn’t remember the title. It makes the point that we keep finding earlier and earlier versions of the alphabet but they are all ordered similarly.

My memory tells me that he refers to a finding from 2000BC but I’d have to get to book out of the library again to be sure.

[Monty]

@CalMeacham

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:

http://compgeom.cs.uiuc.edu/~jeffe/teaching/373/notes/06-hashing.pdf#search=‘Sidney%20Harris%20%20Alphabetical%20order’

That’s a cute joke at the top; however, I wonder what the order of those names should be if one followed it’s ordering. I tried but apparently my mind goes into recursion too soon.

[Monty]

I also wonder how I let that apostophe slip by. It’s =/= possessive. Its =/= misspelling.

[lizardling]

Hey now. Kipling has a whole story (complete with pictures!) of how Taffy and Tegumai made the alphabet. points at book of Just So Stories It’s in a book, so it has to be true.

[pocelene]

I’m starting a movement to reorder the alphabet, to make it easier to use.

I don’t have any of the details yet, but the basic idea would be that the order is logical (i.e., instantly memorable) in some way.

The most obvious would be to start with capital, san serif, letters in the order of increasing number of strokes and complexity:
I L F E … Followed by those with some straight and some curved lines P R B … and ending with the curved letters U C O.

A team (perhaps composed of Nobel laureate physicists, or G.W. Bush’s cronies ?)could sort out the exact order.

Think of the savings in primary education alone!

[Speaker_for_the_Dead]

According to Sacks, the earliest alphabetic writing is from the Wadi el-Hol inscription is somewhere around then, yes. Some of the Semitic people working with/under the Egyptians seem to have decided to dispense with the complexities of the hieroglyphic system and steal a number of alphabetic symbols the Egyptians had, but rarely used.

[pocelene]

Maybe the Egyptians had a better alphabet song than we do.
Since all their phonemes were pictures of things, perhaps the natural order for teaching the symbols would be a rebus. Perhaps in the form of a naughty limerick.

[Johanna]

@bibliophage

The oldest ordering of the alphabet I know of is on a clay tablet inscribed in Ugaritic, a Semitic language written in cuneiform. It dates to about 1300 B.C. and was probably used for teaching purposes. The ordering of the letters in Ugaritic was essentially the same as in related languages like Hebrew and Phoenician, despite the two very different writing systems.

By golly, you’re right!

Let me share with you J.R.R. Tolkien’s take on alphabetical order in Appendix E(i) from The Lord of the Rings:

@J.R.R. Tolkien

[The Tengwar] was not in origin an ‘alphabet’, that is, a haphazard series of letters, each with an independent value of their own, recited in a traditional order that has no reference either to their shapes or functions.[sup]1[/sup] It was, rather, a system of consonantal signs, of similar shapes and style, which could be adapted at choice or convenience to represent the consonants of languages observed (or devised) by the Eldar.

[sup]1[/sup] The only relation in our alphabet that would have appeared intelligible to the Eldar is that between P and B; and their separation from each other, and from F, M, V, would have seemed to them absurd.

Ah, Tolkien, a first-class linguistic geek after my own heart. By ordering his Elvish characters into a systematic grid of phonetic grades and series, he was replicating the principles of ordering used in Devanagari and other Indic alphabets. Devanagari uses graphically related shapes for certain phonetically related pairs: T and Th, p and ph, b and v. Tolkien’s innovation was to make all phonetically related characters also graphically related. I followed a similar principle when I devised the Mömö syllabary.

The unanswered question is how the ancient Semites at Wadi el-Hol or Ugarit chose that specific order for their Egyptian-derived consonantal alphabet when it follows no obvious pattern. Maybe the names tell a story? Ox. House. Camel. Door. Hey!..

See, this ox was looking at a house and a camel tried to get in the door. So he yelled, “Hey!”… etc.

Anybody want to help write the story? I got it started for you.

[WVBrady]

@CynicalGabe

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.

I saw a episode of COPS, where one the police officers said that the only ones that even tried it were the drunks!

I remember in the 2nd grade there was a girl who could say the alphabet backwards very fast. When the teacher remarked about how great that was, I asked (in all seriousness) if that was good for anything. The teacher was a bit embarrased, and finally said, “No, but it’s still nice”. I don’t know if the cops hadn’t started using that test way back then, or whether she had just never been stopped.

Brady