Why Are Alphabet Letters Arranged How They Are?
scienceabc.com
scienceabc.com
> the alphabet’s letters are in that order because they have simply always been that way.
Seriously? Like before the universe?
Quick search leads to Wikipedia (obviously) which actually tries to answer the question: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_alphabet#Letter...
Interestingly, first sounds and "words" produced by human babies are quite similar to the sounds the starting letters of most alphabets produce ("baba", "dada", "gaga" etc): https://www.webmd.com/parenting/baby-talk-your-babys-first-w...
So the answer may be in biology / evolution.
For some reason, the old Scandinavian stylization of this alphabet is not ordered the same, since "futhark" is, like "alphabet" being the first two letters in order, "f" "u" "th" "a" "r" "k", no?
Obviously, in this context, "always" means "a long time". I can understand why you'd be frustrated with how the article ends, but this strikes me as a needlessly pedantic complaint.
The article can basically be summarized as "No one knows why all the letters are placed in the exact order we're familiar with today, but we can guess at the reasons behind a few letters." I found the (suspected) reasons we do know to be interesting.
Phoenician letters had to have an order, because they were also numbers.
Subsequent alphabets preserved that order.
Brahmi, which is the parent script for most Indian scripts as well as a bunch of other scripts in the region (Tibetan, Thai, Burmese, Javanese etc.), has a well-designed alphabet ordering. Simple vowels come first, followed by dipthongs, followed by constants. Consonants themselves are ordered as velar first, followed by palatals, retroflexes, dental and finally labial consonants -- notice the articulation point is moving from the back to the front of the mouth. Within each group the ordering is unvoiced, unvoiced aspirated, voiced, voiced aspirated and finally nasal consonant. It's a thing of beauty.
I hate to disappoint you, but we're really not sure. The practice of having the letters in an established order makes sense: It’s easier to teach and to learn. Why some ancient people put them in that specific order, though, is unknown. Whoever did it didn’t leave any record that we know of explaining why they lined the letters up like that."
https://www.mentalfloss.com/article/29011/why-are-letters-ab...
That DVD taught me how to do the alphabet backwards as well as I can forwards.
It's a good article for its purpose (giving kids a history lesson of our alphabet), and I imagine effective. But you have to appreciate its audience.
All sorts of good illustrations you could use in an article on the history of the alphabet. The memes were pointless.
This is a huge pet peeve of mine. The writer hedges this statement with the passive voice, and "master" is difficult to qualify, but generally speaking English is not a difficult language. I'll concede that phonics are a mess, but it's not riddled with more inconsistencies than most other world languages.
I lived in Vietnam for 6 months with a host family. They said native speakers don't get upset that people don't bother to learn it because they only people that speak it correctly are Vietnamese. It is too hard (it is more complex tonally than Chinese - six tones vs 3).
During my travels: An Italian market clerk wouldn't sell me food until I repeated his sentence correctly; in Cyprus they wouldn't sell me sunscreen because I couldn't count (they refused to break a large bill and laughed that I couldn't count out my change...), and Panama I got literally yelled at for not asking for the Wi-Fi key correctly in Spanish.
Actually it is. And it's not just a matter of opinion, either. Going by objective criteria:
1. English has most of the grammar exceptions of German and French combined, plus a few others gained from other languages it borrowed words and/or constructs from -- which is to say more than most if not all other languages.
2. Phonics are, to echo your thoughts, not just a mess but an utter, complete mess.
3. English's lexical similarity with other languages (whether European or not) is below [0] the typical value you'll find when probing into languages spoken by neighbors.
4. Depending on how you define what a word is, English is widely considered to have the richest set of words to pick from.
It's straightforward to learn International English. But to learn English at a high level is, in fact, very hard. Consider spending some time with a Modern English major from a good university if you need any convincing.
Of course English (and especially the mastery of English) is complex, but it's not exceptionally complex. Your "objective criteria" is sometimes not very objective, and sometimes not very good criteria for language complexity.
1. This point isn't objective. Borrowing grammar from German and French does not mean that we've accumulated more exceptions in our grammar than any other language, it doesn't mean that other languages have not also borrowed, and this does not objectively prove that English has more exceptions than any other language.
Russian requires you to decline a noun by grammatical number (single/plural), one of six cases, and one of three genders. Even after you take these three axises into consideration and find the proper declension in your declension matrix there's still a chance that it doesn't follow the rules that you learned. You can either call this a system of 3 different noun types (one for each gender) with a ton of exceptions, or you can classify it as 18 different noun types with a ton of complex rules, and nearly no exceptions. English is like this as well (particularly phonetics, which is related to the next point). It's hard to be objective about language.
2. We agree on this point, but I want to point out that Chinese and Japanese are an order of magnitude more complex when it comes to phonetics. You need to learn several thousand characters to be considered literate as an adult. I can't read Chinese, but in Japanese the pronunciation of these characters changes depending on context. High frequency examples:
上 - 18th most common Kanji used on Wikipedia, 8 different pronunciations (9 if you consider ショウ and ジョウ different)
生 - 27th most common Kanji on Wikipedia, 12 different pronunciations
3. Lexical similarities isn't a relevant criteria. The inverse to your point, nobody would say "Russian isn't a complicated language because it's lexically similar to Ukrainian." Both can be complex if they're lexically similar, and a lexically unique language could be utterly uncomplicated. The most charitable interpretation I can speak to this point is that lexical similarities definitely help language acquisition, because you get a lot of words "for free" so to speak.
4. Again, I don't think vocab size is a great criteria for language complexity, and it's not very objective. We could inflate this number with a huge dictionary full of words that nobody uses. Some times words are "buy two get one free," like "wind, shield, windshield". Many languages have this (必ず without fail、勝つ victory、必勝 certain victory) and it doesn't reflect complexity in any consistent way.
(Other standard examples being Latin, Mandarin Chinese, and Swahili.)
Which is, indeed, quite a bit more challenging than most languages written with a Latin script.
It's because ancestor and cousin scripts used the phonetic glyphs for numbers as well, and the ordering had to be fixed.
Once Indo-Arabic numerals made it in to the character set, the need for strict ordering went away. But now that characters have numeric values again (ASCII, Unicode), they're fixed forever.
https://historyofenglishpodcast.com/episodes/
He goes into much more detail. He has a separate audiobook that focus on the evolution of the alphabet.
ampersand. (n) 1837, contraction of and per se and, meaning '&' by itself is 'and' (a hybrid phrase, partly in Latin, partly in English). An earlier form of it was colloquial ampassy (1706). The distinction is to avoid confusion with "&" in such formations as "&c.", a once common way of writing "etc." (the et in et cetera is Latin for "and"). The letters a, I, and o also formerly (15c.-16c.) were written a per se, etc., especially when standing alone as words.
The symbol is based on the Latin word et "and," and comes from an old Roman system of shorthand signs (ligatures) attested in Pompeiian graffiti...
In old schoolbooks the ampersand was printed at the end of the alphabet and thus by 1880s the word ampersand had acquired a slang sense of "posterior, rear end, hindquarters."
tldr;
"Why Are Alphabet Letters Arranged How They Are?"
Because the Greeks modified the Phoenician alphabet a bit, and used that order.
"Well...why was the Phoenician alphabet arranged the way it was?"
<no answer>
Before that, the Greeks took the Phoenician alphabet, which had 22 letters ending in "R", "S" and "T".
The Greeks lost a few Phoenician letters and added new letters after "T".
The Phoenicians inherited the alphabet from other closely related Semitic people (very little is known about those), but the Phoenician language was simplified during time and the Phoenician alphabet lost 5 letters from the older alphabet, which had 27 letters.
I am not aware of an older alphabet whose order is known, besides the old 27-letter ancestor of the Phoenician alphabet.
Most evidence about the letter order of the old 27-letter alphabet comes from the Ugaritic alphabet, which was also derived from it, like the Phoenician, but which replaced the graphic signs used by the older alphabet with cuneiform signs, nevertheless retaining the names and the order of the original 27 letters. The Ugaritic alphabet added 3 new letters after the original 27 letters.
The names of the first 27 letters of the Ugaritic alphabet can be seen in the Unicode database (from 0x10380 to 0x1039A).
Many school exercises with the Ugaritic alphabet have been unearthed, so there is no doubt about the letter order.
To remember all these symbols and their pronunciation, a mnemonic is necessary: a well known short speech, and list of letters for first sound of each word of this speech. From there, alphabet is derived naturally.
Guttural palatal <x> dental labial
And in the order aspirated unaspirated
Pretty cool.
As a very young child, I remember thinking that "LMNO" was one letter, until I watched a Sesame Street segment which explicitly addressed this misconception. Since this segment exists, I clearly wasn't the only child who got confused.
my know I now z y x
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they will never know the joy of hearing wham! on the phonograph while typing a college application on a royal 7910.
By whom? I don’t think it would be hard for a person who knows a language from Standard Average European Sprachbund to learn English compared to, say, Chinese, Arabic or Bengali.
Most recent one I encountered was a non-native speaker on a comment thread saying "childs" instead of "children", and there's really no general rule about english grammar that would indicate "ren" being the pluralizing qualifier here. You just have to memorize these things.
How do you pronounce "read"? That depends on if you interpreted the word as past tense or present tense. How do you pronounce "lead"? That depends on if you interpreted the word as the heavy metal or the verb meaning taking charge of an effort. The "o" in lose sounds exactly like the one in choose, but the "o" in loose sounds nothing like the one in chose.
Irregularities are not hard to master, it is one of the easiest things actually, it's rote memorization. For someone whose native language is without articles it would be a struggle to learn a language with them for the first time. Or, for an English native speaker it would be really hard to learn how to construct naturally-sounding Japanese sentences.
If instead of being concerned with articles, tenses, relative clause positioning, noun-verb argreement, topic and focus expression, morphosyntactic alignment, negative coordination, discourse markers, grammatical mood, grammatical genders / noun classes, coverbs, preverbs, measure words, etc you are being concerned with how to pronounce read, it means you learn an easy language (for you), because, probably, your native language shares lots of features with English.
Old English weak noun declension. Hence brethren, oxen, children. Which are the only three examples in common use, so it's easier to learn as an exception.
The change in vowels found in several "irregular" inflections are also holdovers from Germanic vowel changes. For example mouse/mice or goose/geese (for nouns), or sing/sang/sung (for vowels). But again, these are usually taught as lists of exceptions rather than trying to educate people as to the etymology to figure out how to inflect it correctly.
We've done a great disservice to the language by adopting foreign words and then insisting on inflecting them according to the foreign inflection patterns... and sometimes mangling even that (cf. 'octopus', where people sometimes insist that the proper Latin plural is 'octopi' when it is in fact 'octopodes').
The comparison with Chinese, Arabic or Bengali is a bit unfair since the first hurdle is to learn the writing. But there are plenty of phonetic (phonemic) languages/writing systems that at least make it easier to pronounce even if you have no idea what you're saying, just as long as you understand the alphabet and the sound each letter corresponds to.
Better example. Read "c" in "Changes in science of Pacific Ocean".
The "ch" is pretty much always read "tʃ" instead of individual letters. And I think "ci" is also pretty much always pronounced as "si" (Pacific, specific, city, scarcity, etc.).
As an individual letter yes it changes but you can find a semblance of a rule when using the ch vs. ci examples.
Fun read: Ghoti is a creative respelling of the word fish https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ghoti
English is easy to understand, hard to master. Here's an example especially with American Stress.
Imagine that each capitalized word is stressed, this changes the meaning of the sentence.
I did not say he stole the money. i DID not say he stole the money. i did NOT say he stole the money. i did not SAY he stole the money. i did not say HE stole the money. i did not say he STOLE the money. i did not say he stole THE money. i did not say he stole the MONEY.
These mean different things.
Outside of the stress, there are different words for things which depends on the context. poop, fecal matter, feces, shit, stool, poo, manure, dung, droppings, excrement, etc.
Chinese and Arabic are different. They are different because of the written form. Folks feel the same about Japanese, till they see it written out with roman letters. Chinese is tough for English speakers because of the tones, but not for those coming from a tonal language. English is hard for those coming from a tonal language, but not those coming from a stressed and intonation based singing language.
So, like, any other langauge with a literary tradition?
>I did not say he stole the money. i DID not say he stole the money. i did NOT say he stole the money. i did not SAY he stole the money. i did not say HE stole the money. i did not say he STOLE the money. i did not say he stole THE money. i did not say he stole the MONEY.
No person who knows a SAE language would be confused by this, they would probably understand the meaning naturally without it even being explained to them as a rule.
>Chinese and Arabic are different. They are different because of the written form. Folks feel the same about Japanese
Learning a writing system takes like 2 weeks at most, it is a drop in the bucket considering that you would need ~88 weeks to be professionally proficient in Japanese compared to, say, ~24 weeks for Spanish.
>Folks feel the same about Japanese, till they see it written out with roman letters.
While lots of sentences that sound natural in Spanish may sound almost as natural in English, one-to-one Japanese translation would sound completely off and vice versa.
While this is an interesting example, it doesn't really say much about relative difficulty of English.
E.g., in Korean, the most basic way to say the sentence would be:
> (money)-(object marker) (steal)-(past tense)-(quote) (no) (say)-(past tense)
The beauty of it is that it doesn't say who said what or who stole the money - it's all inferred from the context! (You can even get rid of "money" if it's obvious.) But you have to get the politeness level right, of which there are at least four, or six if you are old-fashioned. Plus a bunch of optional verb endings to denote surprise, annoyance, confidence, etc.
Difficulty is in the eyes of the beholder.
If the media around us would be, let’s say Spanish, i’d think a lot of people would learn it faster than english.
Of historical languages, English is no more a struggle than French. It might be harder than Italian or Spanish, but it's a walk in the park compared to e.g. Hungarian, Arabic, Greek, Chinese, and most other languages...
Languages are tools to everyday communication. Why do we keep using historical clunky tools when we are able to create far better ones?
By the way, Esperanto is a popular neutral pragmatic choice. I would be fine with a any well-made community driven tool. For example, I am fond of Ido's digraphs. I think it is easier than Esperanto or French's diacritics.
Because we're not mere computers or animals, to only care about the most efficient communication of commands, facts, and numbers, but we also have a history (reflected in our words and language), a culture (ditto), a literature, poetry, idiom, and song -- all the way to ancestors who spoke the same language, and successor who will carry it forward.