Why is the alphabet in alphabetical order? | Hacker News Reader

Why is the alphabet in alphabetical order?

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45 pointseru26 comments

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

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

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

I don't understand. Could you explain your guess?

I assumed that the meaning of Alpha as first, Beta as second contributed to the ordering of alphabets and that the word 'alphabet' came from Alpha + Beta.

Thanks.

I assume the meaning of alpha and beta as first and second comes from their place in the alphabet.

It's strange for me to imagine it the other way round.

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.

Hence "I am the Alpha and the Omega."

The Beginning and the End- the Great I AM

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")

One of my favorite Wikipedia pages: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_alphabet

Citation needed. (seriously.)

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.)

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.

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.

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

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

Which is what the article says....

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

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

There are many unique combinations of the alphabet.

26 factorial = 4.03291461e26

pick your favorite.

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.

Why is the alphabet in any (never mind some particular) prescribed order? Obvious (to me) answer: to make it easier for kids to memorize. It's working, too. Notwithstanding its inscrutable origins, ABC order as we know it now has survived more or less intact for upwards of 3,000 years.

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.

Numbers (numerals) were not distinct from letters in the West for a long time. China didn't have "letters," and did have Chinese characters that serve as numerals (with place value notation probably coming later there than in India, although some Chinese scholars like to claim priority for that over India). By the time the West had numerals, it had had a well established alphabetical order for more than a millennium.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greek_numerals

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

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