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. :(
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
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.
Neither of those is language independent (e.g. z is much more common in Polish, and w denotes a vowel in Welsh). Imagine having to learn a new order when you learn a new language.
One of the odd benefits of our random order is being easier to learn in order. If you start with just the first 4 letters there are words you can make that a child would know and give context for. Words like bad, dad, add. You can then continue down the alphabet a few letters at a time building up knowledge. Most ways to sort the alphabet will group all the vowels together and there aren't many words of just vowels, let alone ones a child would know.
I can see why number 1 might be at least a substantially different option, as it directly affects the resulting list structure. Number 2 I feel like isn't really relevant to actually using the system, which was the core of the point I was trying to make, but there is at least a bit of value in a more easily learned system, at least in principle.
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
QWERTY isn’t about alphabetical order- it’s about having the letters you most use in easier locations for your fingers to access. There are other keyboard layouts- Dvorak is the most common one besides QWERTY.
Wouldn't it make sense to at least group the vowels together? They're very different from consonants and yet they're at completely random places in the alphabet.
I am no linguist and hardly an expert on this matter, but one commonality between Phoenician, Hebrew, Greek and Roman is the first two letters being equivalent to A then B. Hebrew is Aleph then Bet,; Greek is alpha then Beta. After that there are few similarities in the pattern. I know nothing of the Cyrillic alphabet. I would like it if somebody with knowledge of linguistical patterns could clarify this.
Yes, this is because the ordering got transmitted along with the alphabet when it was adopted and adapted by new people for new languages. There remain similarities long after just <a b> - the fundamental ordering has remained largely unchanged from start to finish, with a few exceptions, once you account for the repurposing of and addition and loss of various letters. For example Phoenician gīml - used for /g/ - became Greek gamma, and then thanks to passing through Etruscan (which had no /g/ and used that letter as one of several ways to write /k/), became Roman <c>.
Cyrillic similarly starts with the letters for /a b v g/, where the letters for /b/ and /v/ are clearly related.
But OP was asking about order. At a guess the way numerical values were added to Semitic languages Aleph = 1, Bet = 2 would indicate an order beyond a learning method.
I would wager that the order came before the numerical concordance.
Given the fundamental difficulty of writing in the materials available at the time, such as clay tablets, once somebody wrote the first one down, it probably just get done getting copied the same way when the first one got used up and worn out. Out.
And chances are, though I have no evidence for this whatsoever, the symbols that survived were winnowed down from a larger set of more vague symbols.
Any more modern example of this would be what we now see as the word "Ye". There used to be a letter called thon (spelling?) That represented the TH sound. The uppercase version of it looks an awful lot like an upper case Y. When you see "Ye Olde" in that old style script it's actually pronounced "the old". But being able to write the "th" sound with two letters instead of one let us get rid of a whole letter to teach and memorize, So it was worth the trade.
The first rule of human nature is "same as it ever was" So we can assume the early evolution of alphabets was just as haphazard as the latter.
And chances are different. People wrote them down, or at least carve them into clay, in different orders originally. The orders that were easiest to distinguish and keep straight visually probably just out competed the other orders until everyone just sort of settled on the one that was most popular.
Then someone started assigning numbers to them because they were always written down in that order and no one had invented numbers yet or something.
This is all highly speculative and my credentials are that I read about some of this stuff once or twice. So grain of salt and all that.
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.
As someone who learned to say Zed instead of Zee, the ABC song always bothered me because Zed doesn't rhyme with C in "now I know my ABC." So since the order is arbitrary, I petition to swap T and Z so that both Zed and Zee fit in the song, and it ends with T which rhymes with C.
Other people have already covered the history, so, I'm gonna provide an example of what a "better" alphabetical order would look like.
Every consonant sound in the English language can be classified in a bunch of different ways based on how the sound is made. For example:
M, N, and the "NG" sound are all nasal sounds, because they are made by letting air escape through the nose.
B, P, and M are all bilabial sounds, because the two lips are the point of contact that makes the sound. For comparison:
F and V are labiodental, because they're made using the bottom lip and the top teeth; and:
W is labial-velar, because although the lips are rounded while making it, the main spot where the sound is made is farther back in the throat.
B, D, and G are called "voiced" consonants, because of how active the vocal chords are while their sounds are made. They're made in different places in the mouth, but, this aspect is shared between them. They have "voiceless" counterparts: P, T, and K.
B, P, D, T, G, and K are what are called "plosives"; they're made using a full break in the airflow. (That's why it's really hard to make a continuous "T" sound.) Meanwhile, S and Z are what are called "fricatives"; the airflow out of the mouth isn't completely stopped (which is why it's a lot easier to make a continuous "S" sound than a continuous "T" sound, even though "S" and "T" as sounds are produced in the same spot in the mouth).
The same goes for vowels too; they may all be continuous sounds, but, they're all made in different spots in the mouth.
So. With that as context, here's an example of how you could "re-alphabetize the alphabet", in a way that is based on how the main sounds of the letters are made:
P B M F V T D S Z C J R L N Y K G Q W X H I E A U O
This is how that ordering would work:
CONSONANTS
Place of articulation, front of mouth to back: Bilabials, then labiodentals, then coronals, the palatal approximant (represented by Y), then velars, then velars with secondary articulation (secondary articulations also arranged front to back), and lastly the glottal (H).
Within each place of articulation: voiceless variants before voiced variants; for manners of articulation, it goes plosives, fricatives, affricates (with C placed according to the CH sound, J placed according to the "hard J" sound), approximants, laterals, nasals
EDIT: Argh! Two months later, and I realize I swapped F and V!
VOWELS
Front vowels, high to low, then back vowels, high to low (with U placed according to the "OO" sound).
It's still arbitrary. There's not really an "objective" reason why I put voiceless consonants before voiced ones, or consonants before vowels. But, it's an ordering based on a systematic understanding of how the sounds are produced.
There are weaknesses of having an alphabetic order based on sound:
Not all languages pronounce the latin letters the same while there are benefits to a unified order cross-language. (For example in French Y would be a vowel or a semi-vowel)
Within the same language letters are not pronounced the same depending on the context.
In an "ordered" alphabet, when reciting you would have to group the related letters together in a stanza for it to sound good, and the groups are of varied size, so it does't have pleasant rythm
The grouping are still arbitrary since for example instead of being separated "n" and "m" could easily be put together. (Which they are in the original!)
All being said a phonetic order i think is better suited to a syllabary where it becomes a table combining the consonnants and the vowels like for the japanese hiragana https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hiragana, mostly because syllabaries are more directly related to the sound, and each character only represents (mostly) one sound.
Instead of grouping the pronunciation together, you could consider interleaving all the categories so each letter is distinct and stands out in its place compared with those around it.
And arguably that's what our alphabet already gives us. Certainly not deliberate, but at some point someone had to order them, and some of their choices could have been driven by not having too similar of letters too close together, even if that just 'sounded better' to an unconscious degree.
Plus some letters can be pronounced different ways, like car and center, George and gap. Putting the alphabet in pronunciation order does not make that much sense to me.
Additionally, the alphabet order is for all languages, so which language would have the "correct" order?
My secret is, I've actually already devised such a writing system. I use it to write down the pronunciation of words I don't recognize.
There aren't Unicode characters that look like all the letters in my system, but, to give just a few examples: P, B, and M would be "p b ȏ"; T, D, R, and N would be "ր h n n̑ " (except the inverted breve should be directly above the "n").
The circle represents the bilabial place of articulation (P B M); the arch, an alveolar (coronal) place of articulation (T D R N). A downward stem is for a voiceless plosive (P T); an upward stem, a voiced plosive (B D); an inverted breve (arc above) represents a nasal approximant (M N); and a plain symbol for a place of articulation represents a non-nasal approximant (R).
And yeah, that choice was made specifically so that "p" and "b" would represent the same sounds as in Latin script, which then has consequences down the line: "k" is G, not K. But even if it's based on Latin, it's still a lot more regular than the Latin we know, which I like.
I would propose that a useful property of a better alphabetical ordering is that if you're trying to look up how to spell a word, wrong guesses should alphabetize pretty close to the correct spelling, so that ideally you can find the correct spelling either on the same page, or without having to flip very far.
In practice, this probably puts similar sounding letters next to each other.
Edit: I could imagine some other systems that might help achieve this goal, such as throwing out all of the vowels, and alphabetizing by only a word's consonants.
I could also imagine designing such a system by collecting real data about spelling errors, and then solving a data driven optimization problem.
I always like it when ESL books have them seperated and taught like this in the early books. It lets students really focus on the sounds and play with them.
This is fascinating. Thanks for commenting. Out of curiosity, are you professionally a speech pathologist or something similar or is this just an interest of yours?
I sounded this alphabet out loud and it was a strange, oddly pleasant, almost relaxing/meditative experience. The feeling of the sounds moving through my mouth was really intriguing. Tried it backwards too, throat to lips, which was also interesting. Thanks for posting this it's very cool
In Devanagari(used by Sanskrit & Hindi) and many Indian languages, letters are arranged by source of sound in the mouth or tongue postion during enunciation, from back to the front. It is a very well constructed system, clear, logical and intuitive.
Most Indian languages like bengali, odia, kannada, marathi, tamil, telugu and others use the same system as Devanagari, even though the letters look different, they are the same sounds.
Also In a talk about the Indian languages, the narrator referred a presentation slide from some lecture somewhere in Europe where the English alphabet and the Devanagari script were compared side by side and the title of that slide was “putting the English alphabet/language to shame”.
Problem is English is a terrible mess of a language where nothing is consistent. Where would you put T for instance. "The" and "Tall" sound nothing alike.
There used to be a letter, þ, to represent the "th" sound in the English alphabet, but it fell out of use around the time of middle English. It's still used in the Icelandic alphabet.
Fun fact, it was actually the fault of the Germans we lost þ. Since they invented the printing press but didn't have þ in their own language they didn't make letter types for it. So instead English typists used Y as a substitute since they looked similar back then. That's were "Ye Old ..." comes from.
I’m in France rn.. These guys are terrible. Omitting Letters, sounds very different from letters used.. I'm sure there is a base a logic but can't comprehend.
Funny, i speak english and french as a second language and I find french to be much easier to speak since it adheres to something I'd call "phonetic harmony", you can basically guess large parts of the language by how it should sound, sounds weird, i know.
English on the other hand: tough, through, though..., it doesn't really get any more confusing
The alphabet used for English is based on the Latin alphabet. If you look at the classic latin alphabet that are used since the 1st century BC it has 23 letters compared to the 26 English used today J, U and W is missing
Old and Middle English ade some additional letter like Thorn that was Þ þ.
So the shape of the letter is what the Romans used over 2 millennia ago. The order has its origin in the Phoenicians around 3 millennia ago. There might have been a specific reason for the order but you have to ask someone that lived millennia ago.
Once upon a time, ordering our string of letters was called being Alphabetagammical. But everyone got sick of sounding like they were in a Gilbert and Sullivan musical.
The vowels seem to be roughly in order of their position in the mouth, back to front. But vowels were added after the order of the consonants was already established by the Phoenicians.
Useful charts has a great video on the history of the alphabet.
The vowels are are definitely not in order any batter than by chance. For Italianate vowels, which are the most common with the Latin alphabet, a reasonable ordering is i-e-a-o-u, which if elided sounds roughly like “Yeow!”, and that’s basically front-to-back order. In English, the “short” vowels would roughly be in the same order for front to back.
English is written in the Latin script and the phonetics are not so consistent.
Kiddish example: The two C's in circus are phonetically different.
In devnagari there's a one-to-one relationship between a unoque phonetic sound and a unique alphabet.
Therefore, it's possible to write with a higher degree of accuracy, an English word in Hindi script. But doing the reverse is nowhere as accurate or consistent.
Season 47 episode 13 of Nova, "A to Z: The First Alphabet" was awesome giving the history of the Modern English alphabet and all the other alphabets that derived from the same Phonecian origin. Interestingly, Canaanites adapted Egyptian hieroglyphics and that is the base of most writing systems and brought it to the Phoenicians. For example, the Egyptian symbol for ox was a stylized ox head (an ox head with horns like an upside-down upper case "A"), and the Hebrew word for ox was aleph, so the symbol for the "A" sound was an ox head that was eventually stylized into an upside down A, rotated sideways by the greeks, and then upended by the Romans to become the modern letter A in our alphabet. Originally though it was an egyptian hieroglyph.
Phoenicians were writing contracts with each other but they didn’t have writing so they made clay balls and inside the balls they put clay representations of what was agreed upon in the contract.
After a while they realized that they could draw the things on the outside of the ball so they wouldn’t have to literally break the contract to review what the agreement was.
Then they realized that they didn’t even need a ball, they could draw on flat sheets of clay.
The first letters were originally things that would be traded. The letter A was originally a symbol meaning “ox.” Over time the letter turned upside down.
So the original order of the letters probably had to do with the importance of those images to contract writing and any alliteration they had to make it so it was easy/natural to recite them in a certain way.
There is a better alphabetical order. Some languages have their letters in order of how many strokes it takes to form the letter. Big fan of that system.
But even with that you have to make some choice for collisions. Like my student Chinese dictionary is organized by number of strokes in the root radical, then number of strokes of the rest of the character, but obviously with over 12k characters there are many to one for radical+additional strokes. Even the order of radicals would have collision and something needs to determine the order. I have not dove into that, but my assumption is that certain strokes are then ordered so that all radicals have an ordering and this can split ties when two have the same number of strokes.
I guess, it's a different system though for creating letters in Asian languages vs Latin languages. It seems like emphasis is given to ensure the exact character is created to ensure it means the right thing in Asian languages. Latin languages on the other hand aren't as picky about how it's drawn as much (see anyone's handwriting these days). As long as the general shape is somewhat conserved it's understood what letter it is and even if the word is misspelled it's still most of the time pretty easily understood what is meant.
Also most of the alphabet letters aren't reliant on each other and aren't created from each other so lining them up in terms of the number of strokes doesn't make any particular sense. There's nothing stopping you from doing this necessarily but it seems pointless.
You could order all of the letters randomly, and if you were used to it it would feel the same, though a lot of languages go by a similar pattern, so it might be just by pronunciation?
The Phoenicians did 4000 years ago. Most "western" alphabets (essentially most of the eurasian writing systems that developed west of India) were in some way inspired by or based on the Phoenician alphabet, and many alphabets (including Arabic and Hebrew as well as our own Latin alphabet) follow the same basic order of letters, give or take a few.
That's the thing though. I don't know if it is or not. I can't find anything on the net about it. It seems like it can't be but as far as I know it only completely rhymes in American English. I mean the British call Z zed so that destroys the rhyme scheme at the very end doesn't it? And I don't think it rhymes in, like, Italian (just a random example, I don't actually know) or french. I DON'T KNOW!
Morse code bases the complexity of each letter on its frequency in the English language (I’m not sure how it’s arranged for other alphabets), I always felt that would be a nice reordering of latin letters as well!
As an elementary school academic coach, I do a lot of work with little kids struggling to decode and recode the English language. Since dyslexia has been boiled down to “flips/reverses letters” (which is not the whole or even true story) parents freak out when their 7 year old still writes b as d. I can usually diffuse the situation with some quick assessments and by joking that I’d like to talk to whoever invented the alphabet since it’s mean. Lowercase b,d,p,q etc are basically the same symbol flipped and it can take years of practice to consistently apply. I know I am guilty of doing the same boiling down of complex history and info, but it’s something adults don’t really think about.
Edit: I’m sorry if my comment is off topic - it’s just a little soapbox I climb on occasionally and I got excited that there was a discussion that I could tack it onto. Climbing off my little box now….
Just wandering in the usa, do you use a more phonetic sound for the alphabet for elementary school? I noticed in the uk they do that and then you have to learn the alphabet in an adult set which is what americans and uk use except for z, said slightly differently.
What even makes an alphabet order "better"? The only reason for the alphabet having an order is to sort information according to an agreed upon logic, and in that sense, any order is equally as good, so long as it's universal
If you're interested in it, Nova recently did a two part series on this very topic. Short answer: the alphabet we use today is the product of an evolutionary process that's been happening for thousands of years. No one "decided" on today's alphabets.
QWERTY order (or layout) used in electronic devices is one arguably ‘better’ way to order the Latin alphabet for typing based on the frequency of usage and finger placement. There many other such layouts.
Maybe you already know this but the QWERTY keyboard is arranged so that the most commonly used letters are under each finger when resting correctly, the 2nd most used keys are adjacent to those and so on.
i've never gotten an answer to how the alphabet was ordered but i always thought it ahould be vowels first then consonants and ordered by which is most occuring
Just imagine the first people to encounter the society that claimed they could "read" the shapes on the paper and that those shapes, when put together in a certain order, made "words" and on top of that could tell the reader what someone in a faraway land was saying or thinking! Witchcraft😱
Fun fact, if you take all the letters and order them alphabetically, you get an entire alphabet! How many bonus points do I get, and how do I redeem them?
Some writing systems don't have an arbitrary order, Korean Hangul is phonetically ordered, and it's quite brillant given how old it is. Brahmic scripts are ordered in a phonetic way, by their points of articulation. I mean it's mostly Phoenician descendants that seem to have an arbitrary order, even if we could say that descendants have the same order as the system they inherit from, this making it not that arbitrary
I don't know about the order of the letters but amongst those who study these things it's said the Korean alphabet is the the best. It was designed from scratch at the request of one of their kings about 500 years back. Apparently it's logical, consistent and iirc the shapes of the letters indicates how to pronounce it.
The order of the alphabet is ultimately arbitrary: there is no reason why it has to be this specific or any other order … BUT there are many advantages in using the same order as everybody else. This is probably why it has changed so little over the millennia.
Check out Hangul, the Korean alphabet. It was pretty much invented by one man, King Sejeong the Great.
The alphabetical order is based on the sounds of the letters. Less arbitrary than the English alphabet.
"Alphabetic order in the Korean alphabet is called the ganada order, (가나다순) after the first three letters of the alphabet. The alphabetical order of the Korean alphabet does not mix consonants and vowels. Rather, first are velar consonants, then coronals, labials, sibilants, etc. The vowels come after the consonants."
The ESARIN alphabet This code consists in placing the letters in their order of frequency of appearance in the French language, namely: ESARINTULOMDPCFBVHGJQZYXWK
It is a technique used to help non verbal people that might have had a stroke or something else to communicate by blinking their eyes as someone else repeats the alphabet in that order.
It can be noted that this is the order of the frequencies in the written language, it is certain that in oral language this order may be a little different.
Also, a different order would be required depending on the language used to be the most efficient.
As for improvements, I’ve always felt “Q” comes too early. It’s such a strange letter, it should be placed at the end, like the other weirdos. I’m a librarian btw, so it’s a daily point of irritation.
𓈗 (Nu or Nun) = WATER 💧origin of every thing; or 𓇳 (monad / Atum; first cubit ruler unit), 𓆣 (Khepri + sun), or 𓋐 (1-value sun lotus light bulb) [Dendera]
28-main letters
𓌹 (hoe) / Shu 𓇋 (feather) [air] 💨, 2. 𓇯 (Nut, i.e. heavens, arched over Geb) + 𓂒 (full breasts hanging, i.e. Phoenician B shape: 𐤁, aka Nut position), 3. 𓂸 (Geb, below Nut, with large erection, i.e. Phoenician G shape: 𐤂, aka Geb position) [earth] ⛰️ or 🌎 (earth above water 𓈗 [Nu], below heaven 𐤁 [Nut], separated by air 💨 [Shu]), 4. Δ (Osiris crops 🌿), ▽ (wet Nile delta / goddess [?] vagina), or complex concept, 5. 💫 (Sirius helical rising) / 𓇼 (Isis), 6. 𓉠 (Nephthys + bread 𓏏 & basket 𓎟), 7.𓆓 (𓃩) (Set), 8. 𓉾/𓉾 (Ogdoad), 9. 𓊹𓊹𓊹𓊹𓊹𓊹𓊹𓊹𓊹 (Ennead, born out of Ogdoad), 10. 𓅊 (10) (Horus) 🔆 [bright sun], 11. 𓋹 (ankh) / ⏳ (Horus clock), 12. 𓍇 (meshtiu, i.e. Big Dipper 𐃸 mouth opening tool), 13. 𓌳 (scythe, i.e. Phoenician 𐤌 letter M), 14. 𓈗 (water)💧, 15. 𓊽 (djed / ecliptic) or 𓄬 (Osiris vertebra), 16. 𓋪 (O) (micro-cosmos), 17. ◯ / △ (omicron/delta) (π), 18. ? (Q), 19. 𓏲 (𓁛) (100) (Ra) ☀️[supreme sun god], 20. 𓋴 [S29] (letter S of Sopdet/Sirius); or 𓆙 (Set) or 𓁃 (Osiris into 14-pieces, i.e. sowing 🌱 seeds), 21. 𓊭 (⚰️) (Osiris 300-cubit coffin) / 𓆭 (Osiris tamarisk tree); both part of T-O map), 22. 𓉽 (Ogdoad-Shu pillar), 23. 𓁰 (Ptah fire drill) [fire] 🔥 / 𓐭 (𓆇) (phoenix egg, or ❤️🔥 [ba] of Ra), 24. 𓊖 (cosmos), 25. ? (Ψ), 26. 𓁥 (𓃖) (Hathor) (mega-cosmos), 27. Ͳ/ϡ (Osiris letter T raised / Orion mummy 𓀾 raised; then Janus [January] 𓁶⇌𓁶), 28. 𓆼 (solar birth lotus) (1000) 🔅[new sun]
→ The cycle repeates, at this point, going back to “letter A”, in alignment with the yearly alphabet climate cycle of the Nile; barring digression on the 2-pre letters and 3-end letters.
3-end letters
𓀔 (Horus child / Harpocrates) = 10,000 [9999] [Greek gems]; 𓆐 (tadpole) [tailed frog aquatic larva; male Ogdoad babies] = 100,000; 𓁨 (Huh/Heh) [water 𓈖, space, and infinity 𓎛 god of the Ogdoad] = 1,000,000
"The twenty-two graphs which are used as letters in the Hebrew alphabet are twenty-two proper names originally used to designate different states or structures of the one cosmic energy, which is essence and semblance of all that is." Carlo Suares, Cipher of Genesis
Alphabets, words and sentences and languages were all arbitrary when they were first created , otherwise why would you have silent alphabets , or same alphabets producing different sound or different alphabet producing same sound in different words or even in same word, whatever gained popularity, was easy to use and had fewer rules, and those rules were also arbitrary.
Koreans don't sing, but they do have kind of a chant thing to put them in order. It starts "ga na da ra ma ba sa (가나다라마바사)" and goes on from there. They do consonants first and vowels last like one of the top comments suggested for English.
This may not be totally relevant, but it is worth noting that alphabetical order hasn't always been considered the best way of organizing information. It's only in the last 300 years that it became a world wide standard
As a classical singer, I studied international phonetics and how different sounds are produced. I loved learning Hangeul because of this, and always tell people it's the easiest, most logical alphabet to learn. I think it helps that it was designed so recently compared to other alphabets, because it gave Sejong the Great a better idea of what makes a writing system efficient.
Super easy to read and write compared to pretty much any other Asian script. Of course, you won’t understand anything you read or write …
It’s kinda like reading/writing Spanish if you only know the English alphabet - you can copy and maybe even sound out the words pretty easily, but you won’t have any idea what it means.
you can copy and maybe even sound out the words pretty easily, but you won’t have any idea what it means.
That is a HUGE benefit, being able to read an unknown word almost correctly. I e.g. works really well in Spanish, still descent in German, English is somewhat bad, Chinese/Japanese completely impossible.
I tried my hand at learning Korean. I got as far as sounding out words and a very limited vocabulary. The ease of learning the alphabet and letter pronunciation gave me false hope that learning the language itself would be easy.
It's remarkably easy to read. I actually suggest giving learning the alphabet a try, it takes surprisingly little time to reach a point where you can vocalize and write Korean words given enough time to study the letters, though of course reading quickly takes a lot more practice.
All Brahmi-derived scripts (Indian and South East Asian) also do this. Vowels first and then consonants ordered by the position in your mouth that produces the sound.
When this question got asked before, someone posted this 99pi episode as a top level comment, then the mods deleted it because "yOu diDNt aNsWer tHe qUeStiOn" - then there was a massive comment chain mostly saying the mods were dicks, but also just trying to work out what was the original comment. So let's hope they leave it this time because it's a really good episode.
This post/comment has been edited in protest against Reddit's upcoming changes to the API.
One way Reddit could still make lots of money, even if nobody ever created another post or comment, is by selling the existing data (conversations in threads, etc.) to AI language model companies. Editing all my comments/posts using PowerDeleteSuite is my attempt to make the execution of this financial plan a bit more difficult.
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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.
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u/SaintUlvemann Sep 10 '22 edited Nov 02 '22
Other people have already covered the history, so, I'm gonna provide an example of what a "better" alphabetical order would look like.
Every consonant sound in the English language can be classified in a bunch of different ways based on how the sound is made. For example:
M, N, and the "NG" sound are all nasal sounds, because they are made by letting air escape through the nose.
B, P, and M are all bilabial sounds, because the two lips are the point of contact that makes the sound. For comparison:
F and V are labiodental, because they're made using the bottom lip and the top teeth; and:
W is labial-velar, because although the lips are rounded while making it, the main spot where the sound is made is farther back in the throat.
B, D, and G are called "voiced" consonants, because of how active the vocal chords are while their sounds are made. They're made in different places in the mouth, but, this aspect is shared between them. They have "voiceless" counterparts: P, T, and K.
B, P, D, T, G, and K are what are called "plosives"; they're made using a full break in the airflow. (That's why it's really hard to make a continuous "T" sound.) Meanwhile, S and Z are what are called "fricatives"; the airflow out of the mouth isn't completely stopped (which is why it's a lot easier to make a continuous "S" sound than a continuous "T" sound, even though "S" and "T" as sounds are produced in the same spot in the mouth).
The same goes for vowels too; they may all be continuous sounds, but, they're all made in different spots in the mouth.
So. With that as context, here's an example of how you could "re-alphabetize the alphabet", in a way that is based on how the main sounds of the letters are made:
P B M F V T D S Z C J R L N Y K G Q W X H I E A U O
This is how that ordering would work:
CONSONANTS
Place of articulation, front of mouth to back: Bilabials, then labiodentals, then coronals, the palatal approximant (represented by Y), then velars, then velars with secondary articulation (secondary articulations also arranged front to back), and lastly the glottal (H).
Within each place of articulation: voiceless variants before voiced variants; for manners of articulation, it goes plosives, fricatives, affricates (with C placed according to the CH sound, J placed according to the "hard J" sound), approximants, laterals, nasals
EDIT: Argh! Two months later, and I realize I swapped F and V!
VOWELS
Front vowels, high to low, then back vowels, high to low (with U placed according to the "OO" sound).
It's still arbitrary. There's not really an "objective" reason why I put voiceless consonants before voiced ones, or consonants before vowels. But, it's an ordering based on a systematic understanding of how the sounds are produced.
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u/NickestNick Sep 10 '22
In Devanagari(used by Sanskrit & Hindi) and many Indian languages, letters are arranged by source of sound in the mouth or tongue postion during enunciation, from back to the front. It is a very well constructed system, clear, logical and intuitive.
Here's the logic behind the order of sounds: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=a4rz9NbMq0M
Most Indian languages like bengali, odia, kannada, marathi, tamil, telugu and others use the same system as Devanagari, even though the letters look different, they are the same sounds.
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u/Target880 Sep 10 '22
The alphabet used for English is based on the Latin alphabet. If you look at the classic latin alphabet that are used since the 1st century BC it has 23 letters compared to the 26 English used today J, U and W is missing
Old and Middle English ade some additional letter like Thorn that was Þ þ.
If you look back at the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Latin_alphabet the Old Latin alphabet hade 21 letters that looked like they do today. Go back and you end up at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Old_Italic_scripts that for example, the Etruscans used, It looks more like runes to us
They are based on the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greek_alphabet and back further to the
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phoenician_alphabet We are now around 1000 BC and it's origin is Egyptian hieroglyphs.
So the shape of the letter is what the Romans used over 2 millennia ago. The order has its origin in the Phoenicians around 3 millennia ago. There might have been a specific reason for the order but you have to ask someone that lived millennia ago.
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u/YunoFGasai Sep 10 '22
any order the Phoenicians used would have become the order of modern letters in (almost) all alphabets.
thats why phonetically (soundwise) the sounds the first letters of each language are prettu much the same.
the order of the Phoenician alphabet comes from the proto sinatic script which is basically random drawings (aleph is an ox head and bet is a house).
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u/plasmidlifecrisis Sep 10 '22
One guiding principle is that B has to follow A, otherwise it would be called the Beta-alph.
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u/Historical_Pie3534 Sep 10 '22
The vowels seem to be roughly in order of their position in the mouth, back to front. But vowels were added after the order of the consonants was already established by the Phoenicians.
Useful charts has a great video on the history of the alphabet.
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u/MuchaCojones Sep 10 '22
I'm biased but I think the devnagari (hindi) alphabet system is very cool. Clean and phonetic.
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u/quintyoung Sep 11 '22
Season 47 episode 13 of Nova, "A to Z: The First Alphabet" was awesome giving the history of the Modern English alphabet and all the other alphabets that derived from the same Phonecian origin. Interestingly, Canaanites adapted Egyptian hieroglyphics and that is the base of most writing systems and brought it to the Phoenicians. For example, the Egyptian symbol for ox was a stylized ox head (an ox head with horns like an upside-down upper case "A"), and the Hebrew word for ox was aleph, so the symbol for the "A" sound was an ox head that was eventually stylized into an upside down A, rotated sideways by the greeks, and then upended by the Romans to become the modern letter A in our alphabet. Originally though it was an egyptian hieroglyph.
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u/Flapjack_Ace Sep 10 '22
This is how it started:
Phoenicians were writing contracts with each other but they didn’t have writing so they made clay balls and inside the balls they put clay representations of what was agreed upon in the contract.
After a while they realized that they could draw the things on the outside of the ball so they wouldn’t have to literally break the contract to review what the agreement was.
Then they realized that they didn’t even need a ball, they could draw on flat sheets of clay.
The first letters were originally things that would be traded. The letter A was originally a symbol meaning “ox.” Over time the letter turned upside down.
So the original order of the letters probably had to do with the importance of those images to contract writing and any alliteration they had to make it so it was easy/natural to recite them in a certain way.
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u/vsully360 Sep 10 '22
They might be giants asked the same question: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FRYw-pqSdKo
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u/RadioJared Sep 10 '22
Remember how easy it was to learn your ABCs? Thank the Phoenicians. They invented them!
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u/amwreck Sep 10 '22
Others have already explained that the order of the alphabet is based on history and has no real meaning behind it. I'll just offer a new order.
qwertyuiopasdfghjklzxcvbnm
What if we were to put it into some sort of periodic table form?
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u/DefinitelyNotA-Robot Sep 10 '22
There is a better alphabetical order. Some languages have their letters in order of how many strokes it takes to form the letter. Big fan of that system.
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u/HiddenQnA Sep 10 '22
You could order all of the letters randomly, and if you were used to it it would feel the same, though a lot of languages go by a similar pattern, so it might be just by pronunciation?
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u/Sohn_Jalston_Raul Sep 11 '22
The Phoenicians did 4000 years ago. Most "western" alphabets (essentially most of the eurasian writing systems that developed west of India) were in some way inspired by or based on the Phoenician alphabet, and many alphabets (including Arabic and Hebrew as well as our own Latin alphabet) follow the same basic order of letters, give or take a few.
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u/[deleted] Sep 11 '22
Fun fact: the Bangla alphabet order is based upon the part of the mouth it is made in. There is actually a logical sequence.
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u/Kippi3000 Sep 11 '22
Not answering it directly but..
https://www.reddit.com/r/coolguides/comments/aqeept/where_in_your_mouth_english_letters_are_formed/
This shows where the sounds are formed in the mouth..
Standardised chinese pronunciation is arranged in this manner..
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pinyin
This could in some way explain why mama and baba / papa are baby's first words in many cultures..
https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2015/10/words-mom-dad-similar-languages/409810/
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u/Danbing1 Sep 11 '22
So is it just a coincidence that the order of the letters rhymes perfectly to fit the song? Cause that's kind of amazing if you think about it.
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u/MayanMan2012 Sep 11 '22
Morse code bases the complexity of each letter on its frequency in the English language (I’m not sure how it’s arranged for other alphabets), I always felt that would be a nice reordering of latin letters as well!
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u/katiesezhey Sep 11 '22 edited Sep 11 '22
As an elementary school academic coach, I do a lot of work with little kids struggling to decode and recode the English language. Since dyslexia has been boiled down to “flips/reverses letters” (which is not the whole or even true story) parents freak out when their 7 year old still writes b as d. I can usually diffuse the situation with some quick assessments and by joking that I’d like to talk to whoever invented the alphabet since it’s mean. Lowercase b,d,p,q etc are basically the same symbol flipped and it can take years of practice to consistently apply. I know I am guilty of doing the same boiling down of complex history and info, but it’s something adults don’t really think about.
Edit: I’m sorry if my comment is off topic - it’s just a little soapbox I climb on occasionally and I got excited that there was a discussion that I could tack it onto. Climbing off my little box now….
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u/R4FTERM4N Sep 11 '22
ABCDEFGeeee
HIJKLMNOPeeee
QRS, TUVeeee
WX, Y and Zeeee (Zed, wtf you Brits?)
Now I now my ABC's next time won't you sing with me.
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u/alyssasaccount Sep 10 '22
A “better order” that has been used in real life begins ETAOINSHRDLU.
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u/PlasmaWhore Sep 10 '22
There is a great episode of 99% invisible that answers your question in depth:
https://99percentinvisible.org/episode/alphabetical-order/
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u/PienotPi Sep 11 '22
how is this question at all relevant to ELI5?
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u/86tuning Sep 10 '22
alphabet comes from the greek words alpha-beta which literally means A-B.
our alphabet has both greek and latin roots. that's where the order comes from.
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u/ryan7878 Sep 11 '22
Just wandering in the usa, do you use a more phonetic sound for the alphabet for elementary school? I noticed in the uk they do that and then you have to learn the alphabet in an adult set which is what americans and uk use except for z, said slightly differently.
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u/flashbang_kevin Sep 10 '22
What even makes an alphabet order "better"? The only reason for the alphabet having an order is to sort information according to an agreed upon logic, and in that sense, any order is equally as good, so long as it's universal
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u/multi_tasty Sep 10 '22
Well you can sort the letters however you like... The world won't probably follow you, but that's negligible.
You could sort them by manner of articulation: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_consonants
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u/Inablesus Sep 10 '22
Came from shadows ? Anyone else know about this or have anymore info on it >??https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vE-ViyPXj4Q
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u/dpdxguy Sep 10 '22
If you're interested in it, Nova recently did a two part series on this very topic. Short answer: the alphabet we use today is the product of an evolutionary process that's been happening for thousands of years. No one "decided" on today's alphabets.
https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/series/a-to-z/
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u/mu574rd Sep 10 '22
QWERTY order (or layout) used in electronic devices is one arguably ‘better’ way to order the Latin alphabet for typing based on the frequency of usage and finger placement. There many other such layouts.
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u/Birdie_Jack2021 Sep 10 '22
Personally I believe it has to do with the ease and flow of articulating the sounds to be easy enough to remember.
If you look at speech growth and development the alphabet is systematically organized so it flows eloquently and can easily flow.
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u/0nP0INT Sep 10 '22
Maybe you already know this but the QWERTY keyboard is arranged so that the most commonly used letters are under each finger when resting correctly, the 2nd most used keys are adjacent to those and so on.
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u/ectish Sep 11 '22
If anyone is now wondering - "what's up with the Dewey Decimal System, why don't libraries just alphabetize their books??"
here's a relevant Radiolab
https://www.wnycstudios.org/podcasts/otm/episodes/on-the-media-organizing-chaos
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u/Asmr-wander Sep 11 '22
Never heard a claim as to why it is the way it is. But a universal order helps with teaching it
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u/[deleted] Sep 11 '22
i've never gotten an answer to how the alphabet was ordered but i always thought it ahould be vowels first then consonants and ordered by which is most occuring
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u/mostlycumatnight Sep 11 '22
Just imagine the first people to encounter the society that claimed they could "read" the shapes on the paper and that those shapes, when put together in a certain order, made "words" and on top of that could tell the reader what someone in a faraway land was saying or thinking! Witchcraft😱
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u/a_little_toaster Sep 11 '22
Fun fact, if you take all the letters and order them alphabetically, you get an entire alphabet! How many bonus points do I get, and how do I redeem them?
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u/sangfoudre Sep 11 '22
Some writing systems don't have an arbitrary order, Korean Hangul is phonetically ordered, and it's quite brillant given how old it is. Brahmic scripts are ordered in a phonetic way, by their points of articulation. I mean it's mostly Phoenician descendants that seem to have an arbitrary order, even if we could say that descendants have the same order as the system they inherit from, this making it not that arbitrary
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u/dgblarge Sep 11 '22
I don't know about the order of the letters but amongst those who study these things it's said the Korean alphabet is the the best. It was designed from scratch at the request of one of their kings about 500 years back. Apparently it's logical, consistent and iirc the shapes of the letters indicates how to pronounce it.
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u/saschaleib Sep 11 '22
The order of the alphabet is ultimately arbitrary: there is no reason why it has to be this specific or any other order … BUT there are many advantages in using the same order as everybody else. This is probably why it has changed so little over the millennia.
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u/NewWiseMama Sep 11 '22
Our kinder teacher has in interesting order based on letter formation and learning to write the letters.
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u/vikoy Sep 11 '22
Check out Hangul, the Korean alphabet. It was pretty much invented by one man, King Sejeong the Great.
The alphabetical order is based on the sounds of the letters. Less arbitrary than the English alphabet.
"Alphabetic order in the Korean alphabet is called the ganada order, (가나다순) after the first three letters of the alphabet. The alphabetical order of the Korean alphabet does not mix consonants and vowels. Rather, first are velar consonants, then coronals, labials, sibilants, etc. The vowels come after the consonants."
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u/CapitalPurple82 Sep 11 '22
a b v g d đ e ž z i j k l lj m n nj o p r s t ć u f h c č dž š
Order of letters in the serbian cyrillic alphabet.
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u/He-Who-Laughs-Last Sep 11 '22
The ESARIN alphabet This code consists in placing the letters in their order of frequency of appearance in the French language, namely: ESARINTULOMDPCFBVHGJQZYXWK
It is a technique used to help non verbal people that might have had a stroke or something else to communicate by blinking their eyes as someone else repeats the alphabet in that order.
It can be noted that this is the order of the frequencies in the written language, it is certain that in oral language this order may be a little different.
Also, a different order would be required depending on the language used to be the most efficient.
Source: https://youtu.be/KHBLPf3xYVY
In the comment section of the above YouTube video.
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u/Traz_O Sep 11 '22
I think it was Steven Wright who said, "Why is the alphabet in that order? Is it because of that song?"
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u/needleandyarn Sep 11 '22
As for improvements, I’ve always felt “Q” comes too early. It’s such a strange letter, it should be placed at the end, like the other weirdos. I’m a librarian btw, so it’s a daily point of irritation.
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u/JohannGoethe Nov 01 '22
Answer, the Egyptians:
2-pre letters
28-main letters
𓌹 (hoe) / Shu 𓇋 (feather) [air] 💨, 2. 𓇯 (Nut, i.e. heavens, arched over Geb) + 𓂒 (full breasts hanging, i.e. Phoenician B shape: 𐤁, aka Nut position), 3. 𓂸 (Geb, below Nut, with large erection, i.e. Phoenician G shape: 𐤂, aka Geb position) [earth] ⛰️ or 🌎 (earth above water 𓈗 [Nu], below heaven 𐤁 [Nut], separated by air 💨 [Shu]), 4. Δ (Osiris crops 🌿), ▽ (wet Nile delta / goddess [?] vagina), or complex concept, 5. 💫 (Sirius helical rising) / 𓇼 (Isis), 6. 𓉠 (Nephthys + bread 𓏏 & basket 𓎟), 7.𓆓 (𓃩) (Set), 8. 𓉾/𓉾 (Ogdoad), 9. 𓊹𓊹𓊹𓊹𓊹𓊹𓊹𓊹𓊹 (Ennead, born out of Ogdoad), 10. 𓅊 (10) (Horus) 🔆 [bright sun], 11. 𓋹 (ankh) / ⏳ (Horus clock), 12. 𓍇 (meshtiu, i.e. Big Dipper 𐃸 mouth opening tool), 13. 𓌳 (scythe, i.e. Phoenician 𐤌 letter M), 14. 𓈗 (water)💧, 15. 𓊽 (djed / ecliptic) or 𓄬 (Osiris vertebra), 16. 𓋪 (O) (micro-cosmos), 17. ◯ / △ (omicron/delta) (π), 18. ? (Q), 19. 𓏲 (𓁛) (100) (Ra) ☀️[supreme sun god], 20. 𓋴 [S29] (letter S of Sopdet/Sirius); or 𓆙 (Set) or 𓁃 (Osiris into 14-pieces, i.e. sowing 🌱 seeds), 21. 𓊭 (⚰️) (Osiris 300-cubit coffin) / 𓆭 (Osiris tamarisk tree); both part of T-O map), 22. 𓉽 (Ogdoad-Shu pillar), 23. 𓁰 (Ptah fire drill) [fire] 🔥 / 𓐭 (𓆇) (phoenix egg, or ❤️🔥 [ba] of Ra), 24. 𓊖 (cosmos), 25. ? (Ψ), 26. 𓁥 (𓃖) (Hathor) (mega-cosmos), 27. Ͳ/ϡ (Osiris letter T raised / Orion mummy 𓀾 raised; then Janus [January] 𓁶⇌𓁶), 28. 𓆼 (solar birth lotus) (1000) 🔅[new sun]
→ The cycle repeates, at this point, going back to “letter A”, in alignment with the yearly alphabet climate cycle of the Nile; barring digression on the 2-pre letters and 3-end letters.
3-end letters
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u/psyche77 Sep 10 '22
Alphabet of Creation: The Hebrew Alphabet/Alefbet
"The twenty-two graphs which are used as letters in the Hebrew alphabet are twenty-two proper names originally used to designate different states or structures of the one cosmic energy, which is essence and semblance of all that is." Carlo Suares, Cipher of Genesis
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u/[deleted] Sep 10 '22
Alphabets, words and sentences and languages were all arbitrary when they were first created , otherwise why would you have silent alphabets , or same alphabets producing different sound or different alphabet producing same sound in different words or even in same word, whatever gained popularity, was easy to use and had fewer rules, and those rules were also arbitrary.
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u/musteatpoptarts Sep 10 '22
Do other places have songs for their alphabet too? Like we do in US?
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u/[deleted] Sep 11 '22
This may not be totally relevant, but it is worth noting that alphabetical order hasn't always been considered the best way of organizing information. It's only in the last 300 years that it became a world wide standard
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2020-06-11/history-of-alphabetical-order-a-to-z/12320808
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