For all practical purposes, the modern order is best considered meaningless, though fixed. Note that the Arabic script is also descended from Phoenician, and its alphabet uses the same order similar to our own.
The ancient Greek Ionian numerals used the position of a letter in the Greek alphabet for its value, i. This is evidence Greek letters had a fixed sequence as of the 4th century BC. As Cerberus pointed out, the sequence was carried into the Latin, and hence English, alphabet. Egyptian hieroglyphs were narrowed down to less than ish, and other people like the Greeks narrowed it down even further as they did not use some letters.
Z used to be next to G or instead of , so when it was re-added it was added to the end. This may be of interest. Sign up to join this community. The best answers are voted up and rise to the top. Stack Overflow for Teams — Collaborate and share knowledge with a private group. Create a free Team What is Teams? Learn more. Ask Question. Asked 10 years, 9 months ago.
Active 2 years, 4 months ago. Viewed 25k times. Is there a similar rationale? Improve this question. Jasper Loy: Only one English alphabet. PLL: I have heard that in Sanskrit the ordering is based on how we pronounce the letters.
You might want to look at these websites books. The history on this is no clear. Also, note that academics believe only three writing systems were developed in the history of humanity. The first, Sumerian, is now extinct. The second, Egyptian, gave rise to the Phoenician alphabet and later Greek, Latin, Indian scripts, and many others.
Early users strung the letters together to correspond to the words of a mnemonic sentence or storyline. There is some appearance of phonetic grouping in the order of the letters of the North Semitic alphabet, but this may be accidental. New additions to an adopted alphabet always seem to get added to the end of the line, leading to x , y and z bringing up the rear.
When the Greeks borrowed the Phoenician letters, they added their own homemade letters to the end, like the ancestral X. The sing-songy order lends itself to music so well that some have asked if the letters were arranged that way to fit the alphabet song. But the ancient order was only first set to the tune and copyrighted in the mids. Vous Dirai-Je, Maman. BY Matt Soniak. Simple as ABC For all the adaptations and mutations, the alphabet's order of letters has been relatively stable.
So the order has ancient roots, but where does it come from? Here are some of the ideas that have floated around among alphabet academics: The first alphabet developed in Egypt might have been adapted from some part of the enormous system of Egyptian hieroglyphics, so it could be that the Egyptian system informed the order, too. What's the Name of That Alphabet Song?
Big Questions Origins History inventions linguistics top-story Words. Between trying to teach your youngest the ABCs, helping your older child master their cursive alphabet , or simply writing RSVP on an invitation, you may have found yourself wondering, why is the alphabet in, well, alphabetical order? Turns out the answer is a little more complicated than you might think.
The first known written language was developed by the Sumerians , who you may remember from the Bible. They created what was called a cuneiform system of symbols and pictographs.
From there, the Egyptians picked it up, according to Reader's Digest. While Egyptians are best known for their hieroglyphics, workers specifically either Canaanite or Semitic ones, according to Mental Floss who were building the pyramids and farming along the Nile River, started to develop an alphabet lettering system. The Phoenicians ran with the idea, developing the world's first fully formed alphabet.
The Greeks started to use an alphabetic system of their own around the 8th century BC, adding vowels and the letter X.
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