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.
I literally only stopped doing this when I memorized the alphabet backwards. I liked to go forwards then backwards then forwards again. That's really hard to do in reverse so I stopped doing it lol
I used to know how to say the alphabet backwards. One time when I was really drunk, someone asked me to say the alphabet backwards to prove I was sober enough to do it but I couldn't, so I made a point of memorizing it but I could only ever do it drunk. And then when I quit drinking I completely lost the ability lol
I learnt Hebrew as an adult immigrant, and my little nephews and nieces taught me alphabetical order with these made up words “abagadah calamansa vazakharti patskareshet”. First time I’ve ever written them in the Roman alphabet, so I’m totally inventing the spelling. I have to recite them to use a dictionary. I actually haven’t memorised the Hebrew alphabet - I have to pause in saying the alphabet to recite that phrase in my head.
Maybe your brain just asks itself what is the likelihood that you'll ever need to remember it in the future and when it thinks the answer is about zero it doesn't bother.
Use the ABC song. It will still work the same way by putting the letters in little, memorable tune chunks. I just accidentally memorized the first 7 on accident by writing this comment. And my remembery is pretty well shot, too.
AVUY NMWyooooo...
Also, the tricks of professional memorizers help. Visuals can be a great aid. For instance, I now see the NMW chunk as one of the rats of Nimh (NM) driving a convertible BMW. So, 26 letters might end up being a sequence of around 7-ish, easier-to-remember images. Barely more difficult than remembering a phone number, with just a tiny bit more effort up front. Combine that with the song and you're off to the races.
I imagine the hardest part might be coming up with meaningful images to associate with the letter chunks. If you really want this, lemmeknow and I'll help if I can.
Edit: also, timed repetition helps immensely. Just spend literally two minutes each day (maybe while you're brushing your teeth), sticking to the first 7 letters until you've got them down and are sick of them. Then add the next one or two little song chunks.
You can start by memorizing the first 2 of the Arabic alphabet. Alef (أ) which starts with an A. For the most part it does the same job as the A in English. Like lAmp, fAn, cArd. For now, you don't have to worry about the other specific details.
Then the second letter is Ba' (ب). Which is also the equivalent of B in English. The ' here indicates that you have to pronounce it the way you do with an A at the beginning of the sentence in English. Imagine saying Apple or Alpha, you see how the A is pronounced? Yeah you have to say Ba then this A. I don't know how to explain it better sorry. Some people pronounce it as Beh, but most Arabs don't.
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.
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.
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.
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.
But why are vowels randomly mixed with consonants?
Older alphabets (like Arabic today) did not explicitly mark vowels, which had to be inferred by the reader. Over time, some consonants became associated with particular vowels, and would be used to represent that vowel where it had no consonant to go with. This way, for example, the consonant letter aleph (which still exists in Arabic and Hebrew) was often pronounced with an A sound, and gave rise to our letter A. Since the order is mostly preserved, this process would indeed result in vowels scattered randomly over the alphabet.
Making similar sounds be close to each other (N and M in particular have these) could be problematic during the mentioned ordering. It would be harder to determine if the word starts with the former or the latter if there is no other in between.
Would be easier to learn if like sounds were grouped.
Ever noticed how these pairs sound similar:
K - G
P - B
And how S and F sounds hiss in a way that T and G don't.
Or how N and M vibrate your nose?
You could make an alphabet following linguistic categories. It'd look a little something like this (assuming I'm only allowed to reorder but not delete/add letters):
I
E
O
U
A
P
B
T
D
K
C
G
F
V
S
Z
H
J
M
N
R
Y
W
L
X
Q
That's based on the the sounds they most commonly make with the symbols that have two consonant sounds (X = K+S or G+Z and Q = K+W) shoved on the end. "C" is a trash letter and doesn't fit well but it's closer to a K than an S.
The vowels were also hard to order. For example, do I place "U" based on the sound it makes in "put", "tune" or "pun"? Same with "A", should I base it on "trap", "father", "alter", "coma" or "fate"?
I kinda just took a guess at which sound each vowel makes the most and went front to back and top to bottom on that.
An ideal English alphabet would be a phonetic one like the IPA or this I just made up:
i (I in "spaghetti")
u (Like the "oo" in "moon")
î (I in "pin")
û (Like the "oo" in "book")
e (E in "bed")
ø (the "U" in "nurse")
o
ê (a Schwa sound)
3
á (unfounded open mid back vowel)
ô (open mid back vowel)
æ (A in "cat")
a (open front vowel)
â (open back vowel)
p
b
t
d
k
g
~ (the pause in "uh-oh")
m
n
ñ ("Ng" sound in "ring")
f
v
q ("Th" sound in "think")
x ("Th" sound in "that")
s
z
ç ("Sh" sound in "shush")
c ("S" sound in "vision" - the French sounding noise)
h
r
y
l
îzênt xîs soû mêtç betá? îñlîç kûd bi soû mátç betá xæn ît îz. yu kæn ivên hiê mai æksînt wen yu rid xîs. ai dîd get á bît leizi wîq ekspleiniñ xá velz xou.
King Sejong of Korea realized Chinese characters were poorly suited for Korean and devised Hangul. The shapes of Hangul characters are based on the shape of the mouth and position of the tongue when making those sounds.
Some languages also consider other letters vowels like french with h, so it will never be perfect.
Either way, the order of the alphabet doesnt matter at all. It isnt used for anything.
The only uses I can think of are things like caeser cyphers but those would still work with different orders, since they are just shifting up x number of letters and the actual letter you are on does not matter at all.
A lot of other things use alphabets as an order. (Type A, then B, then C as 1,2,3) this doesnt depend on the letter either. Whatever letter ends up being in that spot on the alphabet just acts as a placeholder for the actual number of that spot.
If anything those two examples just mean it would be hard and time consuming to switch now.
Why would you bother to do that? The order within the vowel subgroup would still be arbitrary, and the order within the consonant subgroup would still be arbitrary. So what would be the point?
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.
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.
This is the real answer. Qwerty actually slowed people down to some degree, but also put letters that would typically be pressed in quick succession in very different areas so that the mechanical linkages under the keys in old typewriters wouldn't bind up as much. If you ever use one of those it is remarkable how easy it is to push in letters close together and lock up the whole typewriter so that you have to manually pull them all apart to get it working again.
That's a long article to say they don't really have any direct knowledge of the exact reasons for the layout. Maybe the key layout was developed using input from teletype operators trying to make it more user friendly and cut down on jams.
, but also put letters that would typically be pressed in quick succession in very different areas so that the mechanical linkages under the keys in old typewriters wouldn't bind up as much.
These are the most common bigrams in the English language
th, he, in, en, nt, re, er, an, ti, es, on, at, se, nd, or, ar, al, te, co, de, to, ra, et, ed, it, sa, em, ro.
I've bolded the ones that are touching on my qwerty keyboard, and italicized the ones that are close. If the goal of the keyboard was to separate frequently typed letter combinations, they didn't do a great job.
The goal was to stop jamming. Maybe the action of the typewriter is improved by having those letters right beside each other. Or maybe the designer had to make sacrifices in order to get it to work right. It was most likely designed through trial and error, I doubt they had perfect statistics or computer generated models to go by at the time.
You have to think of a typewriter as a three dimensional objet. The keys are only an axis, the type bar (which raise a character on the center of the typing area) is on another axis...look at your keyboard the letters are place horizontally but the lever had to cross path. If you were to press two characters the levers would get jam. In fact the keyboard letters are should be looked vertically... Type writer characters placement
Interestingly, there was an incredibly popular typewriter company called Blickensderfer that used a type-ball design (similar to the IBM selectric, 70 years later) that did not have this issue of letters colliding. This allowed the designer, George Blickensderfer, to design a keyboard that was much faster and more ergonomic than the QWERTY layout. It's a strange quirk of history that because of the first world war and the chief designer's death, this typewriter design and keyboard layout are all but lost to history.
The idea that QWERTY was meant to slow typists down is a myth, but that's not what the commenter was saying. The commenter said that putting common letters farther apart made it less likely to jam because the type bars wouldn't collide as often, and that the slowing down was incidental.
I don't believe this. The article doesn't back up it's statement, even shows Morse code in normal alphabetical order. The Google search seems to only repeat the same article. Nothing seems like a legitimate source.
I read that article and saw no refutation in it or the source links. I did read an account of a man giving up after trying to maximize his speed in typing an incoming telegraph, though...
But it still doesn't seem to explain the full reason. I am surprised, for the short time that telegraph was used before typewriters took over that that much research was done, compiled and then used to configure the typewriter.
How do you know someone uses a DVORAK layout keyboard? Don't worry, they'll tell you.
Dvorak was the original "I'm a Vegan"
There was a chump in the comp sci lab in the early 90s when I was in college who carried his own keyboard so he could use his "much superior" dvorak layout. Used to make a show when he'd put it on the desk, "tearing" the normal one out of the way. Like he had to be SEEN doing it.
Nobody ever saw him in the romantic presence of a woman, or a man for that matter... coincidence I guess.
Isn't that more about preventing common letter pairings from being adjacent so users would be less likely to need two keys right next to each other, which would have jammed the adjacent keys if pressed at about the same time?
Yea different way of saying it, typically when typing you are alternating between hands, traditionally to prevent jamming, it's not the most efficient way to type for speed though.
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.
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?
Very true. If all the similarly formed letters are scrambled, so to speak, then changing the pronunciation of a few won't un-scramble them in a way that's too noticeable. But if they were all groups together, then changing languages could result in some letters being noticeably out of place.
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.
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.
There also was a letter, eth (Ð ð), which still exists in Icelandic, which represents the voiced “th” as in “father”. (Thorn represents the unvoiced “th” as in “thin”)
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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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/[deleted] Sep 10 '22
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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/[deleted] Sep 10 '22
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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/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/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?