You can do that because it's on purpose.
King Sejong wanted every Korean to be literate. "A wise man can acquaint himself with them before the morning is over; a stupid man can learn them in the space of ten days"
King Sejong wanted every Korean to be literate. "A wise man can acquaint himself with them before the morning is over; a stupid man can learn them in the space of ten days"
But I can still ask: are there documented cases where a language was intentionally obfuscated?
There is no natural ordering for sounds, so it's true that the ultimate reason for an alphabetic sequence can't exist. But then, since the concept is ill-founded anyway, that's not what anyone is ever talking about when they talk about the reason for an alphabetic sequence.
It is obvious that any fully original writing system will be ordered in large part arbitrarily. But an explanation is called for when an unoriginal writing system puts its symbols in a strange order. Even where the writing system is autochthonous, but the concept of writing is not, the system is likely to be conventionally ordered, as in the case of the Japanese syllabary, which conforms to the traditional ordering of Sanskrit.
Thaana is overtly strange, as you can see in the wikipedia entry:
> The first nine letters (h–v) are derived from the Arabic numerals, whereas the next nine (m–d) were the local Indic numerals. The remaining letters for loanwords (z–ch) and Arabic transliteration are derived from phonetically similar native consonants by means of diacritics (like nuqta), with the exception of y, which is of unknown origin.
> The order of the Thaana alphabet (ha, shaviyani, noonu, raa, baa, etc.) does not follow the order of other Indic scripts or of the Arabic script.
Do we know how the order ultimately came about, and what it was originally based on? I don’t mean “because earlier alphabets had that order”, I mean an explanation in terms of the characters of the (earlier) alphabet themselves. I’m genuinely curious. I don’t remember having seen such an explanation.
That aside, my original point wasn’t to suggest that the Latin alphabet is similar in how its order came about to the Thaana alphabet. I’m well aware that it is based on an ancestry of earlier alphabets and their order. I merely made the point that the order does look rather arbitrary as well, meaning one shouldn’t necessarily expect a historically grown alphabet to exhibit an order that makes particular sense in terms of its characters.
It is still a matter of debate, however the order in which Proto-Sinaic scripts and the Phoenician alphabets laid letters out is thought to have been based on the acrophonic principle, where the first sound of the word that represented the object or concept depicted by the letter determined its place in the alphabet. Later alphabetic and abiguda writing systems have followed an earlier lead.
There have also been suggestions that it may have been influenced by the order of Egyptian hieroglyphic signs, whilst others propose that it could be based on a mnemonic sequence to make it easier to remember.
The short answer is that… we may never find out why it happened to be that way.