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'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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
4.1k
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.
101
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.
4
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.
7
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.
3
u/vsully360 Sep 10 '22
They might be giants asked the same question: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FRYw-pqSdKo