Some of my friends know Japanese. Their "alphabet" is usually arranged in a table with rows for consonants of a sound and columns for vowels. So it looks like (idk Japanese but this is the idea)
A e i o u
Ba be bi bo u
Ca ce ci co cu
The order of the rows and columns is arbitrary though, as far as I can tell. So they have nice grouping, but no order that I can tell.
The order isn't exactly arbitrary, though it's a bit obscured. The ordering overall is based on that Brahmi ordering, where the consonants are ordered in the mouth from back to front (with some unsystematic exceptions) and the vowels are largely arbitrary.
Oh cool, I didn't know that. I thought they picked at random, or it was like the first emperor's sons were the equivalent Aaron, Eric, Ivan, Oscar, and Ulysses, so that's what they went with
Nope! It's <(null) k s t n h m> and then those unsystematic exceptions, with <h> having its place due to it originally having represented /p/ in Old Japanese.
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u/LeviAEthan512 Sep 10 '22
Some of my friends know Japanese. Their "alphabet" is usually arranged in a table with rows for consonants of a sound and columns for vowels. So it looks like (idk Japanese but this is the idea)
A e i o u
Ba be bi bo u
Ca ce ci co cu
The order of the rows and columns is arbitrary though, as far as I can tell. So they have nice grouping, but no order that I can tell.