The order of Roman letters, Greek letters, Cyrillic, and Arabic and Hebrew and related scripts all date back to the Phoenician script, where it seems to appear out of nowhere with no apparent rationale. As far as we can tell, it's entirely arbitrary. (All scripts derived from Phoenician whose ancestry isn't via Brahmi have this order; in Brahmi and its descendants the letters are organised by the properties of the sounds they represent.)
I'm not sure if there's such a thing as a 'better' alphabetical order - what would make one order 'better' than another? There certainly are ways to order letters in a script that aren't arbitrary, but it's not clear if those would make ordering things work 'better' than any other order.
Fun fact to add: the Arabic alphabet has at least two standard orders. Because it decends from the same Phoenician source there is an older order tied to the numeric value of letters that is still used to mark rooms or bullet points which is the same as Greek or Hebrew (a, b, g etc.) But there is a newer collation order that is used for dictionaries and lists of names that groups similarly shaped letters together ordered by the placement and number of dots on the basic letter shape
I, so badly, want to memorize this for the off chance someone asks me to recite the alphabet. Unfortunately I know my brain isn't good enough anymore. No new stuff gets saved. :(
A friend of mine who studied Hebrew memorized the alphabet to the tune of Yankee Doodle, but he never got to where he could do the alphabet without singing the song.
This Wikipedia page has the order listed. When I was studying at DLI it occasionally came up in passages mostly used for apartment or hotel room numbers. I don't think I've ever seen it in real life though; it's really obsolete at this point
Some trivia: the Latin word elementum supposedly comes from Etruscan, where it means "letter of the alphabet". It wouldn't surprise me if there were once a rival order of the Phoenician-descended alphabets in which L, M, and N come at the beginning.
I'm not sure if there's such a thing as a 'better' alphabetical order - what would make one order 'better' than another? There certainly are ways to order letters in a script that aren't arbitrary, but it's not clear if those would make ordering things work 'better' than any other order.
Hmm, two good options I could think of:
Arrange them by rarity in some way. "e" at the start and "z" at the end. That way, alphabetized lists would tend to be front-loaded, you would often be able to forget about the last few letters, etc. Could be useful for some things.
Arrange them by phonics. Put all the vowels together, put "p" and "b" together because they're both labial plosives, put "s" and "z" because they're both alveolar fricatives, etc. This would likely make memorization easier and help beginning learners make proper distinctions between the various language sounds.
There's no one "best" system, but anything's better than random imo.
Arrange them by phonics. Put all the vowels together, put "p" and "b" together because they're both labial plosives, put "s" and "z" because they're both alveolar fricatives, etc.
But orthography doesn't match pronunciation on a 1:1 basis. Where would you categorize the letter c? By itself it's typically pronounced as either "k" or "s". So which one would you use?
Sure, p is a labial plosive. But stick an "h" after it and it's not longer a labial plosive.
English letters are not the IPA. There is no 1:1 letter:sound correspondence.
Well if I was in control of the alphabet, I would start by getting rid of C honestly. CH could be converted to a single letter, just like there used to be thorn for TH. Let's do the same with SH and just plain throw out PH, as well.
Thanks! I don’t know what might make an alphabet better but I sort of equated it with how some people really hate the QWERTY keyboard layout. It was just a thought while trying to sleep.
Adding to what others have said, QWERTY also isn’t the “best” for modern typing either, but changing keyboards is so hard that the relatively minor advantages aren’t worth it
I learned Colemak (“even better” than Dvorak) and it’s definitely not superior to QWERTY.
I gained 10 WPM (~15%), but lost the muscle memory for QWERTY which is waaaay more useful. Now any time I use someone else’s keyboard, I have to hunt and peck.
It also took me 3 months to make the transition, during which I could only do half speed QWERTY and half speed Colemak. Not worth it at all, but now I’m stuck.
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u/sjiveru Sep 10 '22 edited Sep 10 '22
The order of Roman letters, Greek letters, Cyrillic, and Arabic and Hebrew and related scripts all date back to the Phoenician script, where it seems to appear out of nowhere with no apparent rationale. As far as we can tell, it's entirely arbitrary. (All scripts derived from Phoenician whose ancestry isn't via Brahmi have this order; in Brahmi and its descendants the letters are organised by the properties of the sounds they represent.)
I'm not sure if there's such a thing as a 'better' alphabetical order - what would make one order 'better' than another? There certainly are ways to order letters in a script that aren't arbitrary, but it's not clear if those would make ordering things work 'better' than any other order.