

Why is the alphabet in alphabetical order? - eru
http://www.straightdope.com/columns/read/2696/why-is-the-alphabet-in-alphabetical-order

======
__david__
He didn't mention thorn, my favorite obsolete letter, and the reason for old
timey signs that say "Ye olde something or other..."

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thorn_%28letter%29>

~~~
GeneralMaximus
Thanks for that. I've always thought the "ye" was pronounced like "yay!" :p

------
chime
I always thought it was because A = Alpha, B = Beta, Z = Zeta and the rest
were fillers in between. Thanks Cecil!

~~~
indiejade
Zeta isn't the last letter of the (Greek) alphabet; Omega is:
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Omega>. However, your latter comment about the
word alphabet being derived from Alpha + Beta is (kinda obviously) somewhat
correct: <http://www.quinapalus.com/gr0.1.html>.

~~~
baddox
Hence "I am the Alpha and the Omega."

~~~
derefr
Something I bet most people never noticed (I never did until it was pointed
out to me):

Omega -> O, Mega (large "O")

Omicron -> O, Micron (small "O")

------
bdr
One of my favorite Wikipedia pages:
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_alphabet>

------
swolchok
Citation needed. (seriously.)

~~~
endtime
Which part? If it helps, I can confirm the part about the roots in Hebrew - I
can't type in Hebrew on this computer, but the Hebrew alphabet is,
transliterated:

aleph, bet (vet), gimel, dalet, hey, vav, zayin, chet, tet, yud, kaf (chaf),
lamed, mem, nun, samech, ayin, pey (fey), tzadi, kuf, reish, shin (sin), taf

Most letters make the same sound as the beginning of their names, and it's not
hard to see the parallel to the Greek alphabet. (Note that in Hebrew, vowels
are not letters, just markings above and below the letters. Aleph and ayin
used to be guttural letters, but in modern Hebrew they sort of just function
as glottal stops.)

~~~
tokenadult
Yes, there is no doubt whatever that the alphabetical order of Roman script
comes from Greek, which in turn gets its alphabetical order from Near East
Semitic alphabets.

------
abefortas
Tengwar, Tolkien's Elvish writing system, had a sort of table of letters
instead of an alphabet. If you knew the glyph at the top of each column and
the permutation for each row, you could figure out all the characters. It was
pretty cool.

~~~
klipt
It uses lots of symmetries, which reduces the number of arbitrary features,
but also makes it a dyslexic's nightmare.

------
baddox
The alphabet is irreversibly and tautologically in alphabetical order. This
article was actually answering "Where did the order of our alphabet come
from?"

~~~
almost
Which is what the article says....

------
Angostura
If you are interested in the origins of the individual letters, Wikipedia's
entries for A, B, C etc. are worth a read.

------
stuntgoat
There are many unique combinations of the alphabet.

26 factorial = 4.03291461e26

pick your favorite.

------
eru
I wondered about this questions for ages. I should have searched the web for
the answer earlier.

------
amalcon
Er... Author has it backwards. The question isn't "Why ABC?" It's "Why not
some other order?"

The "ABC" ordering probably won for the same reason as the "QWERTY" layout won
in the U.S: because that's what everyone learned with, so that's what everyone
teaches with.

There's going to be some "canonical" order for something like an alphabet, and
whatever order that was, we'd be sitting here today asking "Why this order?"
If there is no obviously better order, then this one's simply as likely as any
other.

~~~
tutwabee
Why must the alphabet have a "canonical" order? It seems like the alphabet has
an order for recitation purposes and for convenience when ordering things.

Recitation seems unnecessary in teaching alphabets and as long as numbers are
well-known and are distinct from letters, then they could be used to order
items in daily life.

~~~
klipt
To put it in computer science lingo: an ordered datatype is easier to search
and sort.

