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Comment by Drakar1903 | Hacker News Reader

Drakar1903

So that singing the alphabet song we learned as a child is more melodic.

If the letters were indeed arranged in service of the alphabet song, they did a terrible job. "G" and "P" are too far apart, so the letters L–P have to be sung really fast for the rhyme to work.

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.

I like the backwards variant but it suffers the same problem.

    my know I now z y x  
    me with sing you won't time next  
    z y x, w  
    v u t  
    s r q  
    p o n m  
    l k j  
    i h g f  
    e d c b a

i.e. not so lmntary.

Ah, the old "elemenopee"

yes, we could in theory group them by plosives and fricatives and such, but that song would sound completely whack

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