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While in theory the relationship is arbitrary (in the end we just need the letter "0" and the letter "1") I think that there are practical reasons, such a conciseness (I don't want most of my sounds to use two or more letters, especially those that are used a lot), similarity between similar sounds, and similarity with other languages using the "same" alphabet (I hope nobody will every use the letter "a" to sound as a "t").

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"A" is derived from the Phoenician consonant ʾālep, which is the glottal stop represented by ʾ in that transliteration of the letter's name. The Greeks reinterpreted it to mean the vowel sound instead, probably because there was no glottal stop in Greek. So on a very long timescale, it's possible that "a" will end up being pronounced as "t".

Upvoted for that nugget, but incidentally I noticed your name before and wondered if it was a ref to Yoruba the language?

The opposite actually. A long time ago, I came up with "yoruba" as my username for various forums. (I think I was going for a vaguely Japanese look.) Some time later, I noticed "Yoruba" in the language selection sidebar of a Wikipedia article, so I decided to swap out a letter to make my username distinct.

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