Why is the alphabet put in that specific order?

Question

I mean, why does the alphabet start with a and end with z, why not the other way round? Why is b the second letter and y the 25th, when b could have been the 11th and y the third?, etc.

Serious answers, please, the alphabet was invented before the song!

I understand what Robbie P is trying to get at, but how can you have logic and order with the alphabet? They don't have any particular value.

As for those stupid 'because it has to be in alphabetical order' answers, there was no such thing until the alphabet had a specific order. If you're going to reply with a similar answer, then **** off, unless you have a good reason.

Answer 1

The English alphabet has 26 letters and a fixed order, true enough, but Z wasn't always 26th - originally it was 7th! The history of the alphabet's order runs like this.

The basic order of the alphabet follows the Phoenician order of letters, which seems to be fixed at an early point.
These earliest letters are as follows:

A B C D E F Z H I K L M N O P Q R S T

These letters are all consonants (no vowels /a/ /e/ /i/ /o/ /u/). They were probably pronounced:

' (the tt in Cockney 'bottle' - /bo'el/)
C was pronounced /g/
E was pronounced /h/
F was pronounced /w/
H was pronounced /H/, an /h/ at the back of the throat
was pronounced /t'/, an emphatic /t/ (various theories!)
I was pronounced /y/
was probably pronounced /s/
O was pronounced at the back of the throat (like Arabic 'ain)
was pronounced /s'/, an emphatic /s/ (various theories!)
Q was pronounced /k'/, an emphatic /k/ (various theories!)
S was probably pronounced /sh/

My guess - we don't know, of course - that the order of letters at this time was fixed simply because it was easier to teach people letters in a fixed order - then you're not likely to drop any while learning [Emma C has a point!].

Next, the letters were borrowed by the Greeks, who used some of the letters for vowels and added some new ones onto the end (naturally). This order is that of West Greek (its alphabet was slightly different from classical Greek and Modern Greek):

A B C D E F Z H I K L M N O P Q R S T Y X

A changed from /'/ to /a/
E changed from /h/ to /e/
F ('digamma') remained /w/
H changed from /H/ to /h/ (classical Greek is different, long /e/)
was /t'h/ (as in "iT Helps")
I was both /y/ and /i/
was /ss/ (but wasn't used much)
O changed to /o/
was dropped quite early as Greek only needed one /s/
Q changed to /k/ (and was dropped later on)
S changed from /sh/ to /s/
Y was /u/
X was /ks/ (classical /k'h/)
was /p'h/ (as in "hiP Hop")
was /k'h/ (as in "saCK Hop", Classical /ps/)

The Etruscans borrowed this West Greek, and the Latins borrowed the Etruscan alphabet.

A B C D E F H I K L M N O P Q R S T V X

The changes during this process were:
F changed to /f/
Z was dropped
was dropped
was dropped
Q was used for /k/ in /kw/
V was used for /w/
and were dropped

After adoption of the Etruscan Alphabet, the Romans adapted C to form a new letter, G, which was put in place of Z (after F).

The Romans then added two new letters to describe Greek sounds in new words from Greek (East Greek now), Y and Z, which they stuck naturally on the end of the alphabet.

So the Latin Alphabet was:

A B C D E F G H I K L M N O P Q R S T V X Y Z

I was pronounced /i/ and /y/
V was pronounced /u/ and /w/ (/w/ later became /v/)

In the Middle Ages:

I for /i/ was written I, I for /y/ was written J
V for /u/ was written /u/, V for /v/ was written V
The new letters were written next to the old letters they were variants of, the consonants (J, V) following the vowels (I, U).

W was another variant of V added to the alphabet of some Germanic languages like English. It was placed after the letter it was a variant of too, V.

So there you have it - an ancient alphabet of a fixed order (but an order we're not quite sure of the reason for) which has had letters added to the end, or altered and added in to similar sounds. The order in later Greek and in later Hebrew (a language very close to Phoenician) was used for numbers too, but in the earliest times when the order of the (Phoenician, Greek) alphabet was fixed, they don't seem to be tied to numbers.

Not all alphabets have 26 letters - Italian has a 21 letter alphabet, for example, with JKWXY used only for foreign words. And some have more than 26, Norwegian or Turkish, for example. Icelandic still has the letters thorn and eth that used to be in the English alphabet but which were dropped.

Answer 2

Our alphabet has come form the Latin alphabet, itself develpoed from the Ancient Greeks, who adapted the first alphabet invented by the Phoenicians around 3000 years ago. It was similar to today's Hebrew alphabet. The Arabic alphabet also developed from the Phoenician, and did not directly influence the Latin one.

Each time the alphabet was taken and adapted to a neew language, some letters were added for new sounds, others were made to stand for different sounds than in the original, and some were dropped. Occasionally the order changed around a bit too.

Nevertheless, much of the Phoenician letter order is preserved today. As to why they fell into that particular order, no-one knows, but it's quite possible that there was some sort of jingle to remember them by, which helped to fix the order - so perhaps it really was the song that came first....

Answer 3

jimquk is closest... but the Phoenicians did NOT invent the alphabet...it's simply that they, as traders, spread it to the Greeks, Etruscans, etc.

So, here's the SHORT answer: the BASIC order of our letters goes back through Latin, through Greek to Phoenician and the earliest alphabets invented by speakers of "Northwest Semitic" languages (the group that includes Hebrew). This order (with modifications necessitated by differences in the languages adapting the letters to their own languages) goes back to at least the mid 2nd millennium BC, but we really don't know why they did it this way.

In fact, the very NAME "alphabet" betrays these roots!

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Fuller answer (hang on!):

The LATIN letters were derived from a form of the GREEK alphabet, and the term "alphabet" is based on the first two letters of the Greek alphabet --"alpha" and "beta" (so the idea of the word is the same as "a-b-c's"). But these Greek names are rather odd --meaningless, in fact. Why? That's because the Greeks borrowed a number of the NAMES for their letters from the source of the letters themselves, the seafaring traders of Phoenicia.

The Phoenicians did not invent this system themselves, but were part of a cluster of related "Semitic" languages spoken centered in the regions later called Syria & Palestine. The letter-names are derived from actual words which BEGAN with the sound that letter is used to represent (e.g., "aleph", meaning "ox", "beth" meaning "house").

We can actually still see much of the original Semitic order of the letters in the Latin alphabet, and even more in the Greek. The original letters were at times used to represent a different sound from the original letter, esp when the original letter represented a sound unlike any in the language doing the borrowing. (This is how the Greeks came up with the first set of VOWELS, which were not part of the original Semitic alphabet.)

The major changes/differences in ORDER were caused when the borrowing language dropped a letter it could not use... and more often by adding letters needed in the borrower's language. These new letters were most often added at the end, after "T", the final letter in the Semitic alphabets. Later, after the early Latin alphabet was well-established, some letters"split" into variants, which were listed next to their "parent" letter. Thus "I" and "J" come from one letter, "U" "V" and "W" were from one letter.

So when was did this particular SEMITIC order of the alphabet come about, and why? Our earliest proven examples of the letters in the basic order used to this day are clay tablets the list the letters in order (perhaps for training scribes?) from the ancient Syrian city of Ugarit (the language, re-discovered in the 1920s is called "Ugaritic"). These show us that this order existed by at least 1300 BC. (with some additional letters for sounds that were no longer found in later languages like Phoenician, Biblical Hebrew and Aramaic).

(A few centuries later we find reflections of this order in the Bible. The clearest examples are "acrostic" poetic passages in which succeeding verses or sets of verses begins with the next letter of the alphabet. Psalm 119 is the most well-known example of this practice, and many English Bibles even mark the successive stanzas as "Aleph" "Beth", etc. )

But we still do not know why they adopted THIS order! Perhaps there is some ancient lost memory device or set of devices (story? set of sentences?) in which this particular order was found useful for remembering the various letters. Perhaps certain sounds were thought easy to group together (think of how "l m n" flows for us).

Many believe the inventors of the alphabet were speakers of a Semitic language living in or near Egypt. So it is possible that the IDEA for an alphabets owed something to a part of the system of Egyptians hieroglyphics. In that case, perhaps the groupings of the letters and words may also be suggested by something in Egyptian learning and culture, or at least in the culture of this one group. But unfortunately, all evidence of how this might have happened, including the development of the order of letters, is lost to us.

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To further complicate matters, we should also note that there is a SECOND order to the ancient Semitic alphabet. The basic one discussed so far (from which Western alphabets derive) is called the "Proto-Canaanite" alphabet. But there was also a "South Semitic" alphabet, which is reflected in the order of South Arabian languages, Ethiopic, etc..

Why two (and apparently ONLY two) ancient orders? Which of the two is older?

It is said that the South Arabian version broke off the 13th century BC. But how did all this happen? Did the South Arabian order reflect another equally ancient tradition? We really do not know.
http://www.answers.com/topic/south-arabian-alphabet

Answer 4

No idea about the latin alphabet, but there is a theory that the full names of the letters of the greek alphabet (ALPHA, BITA, GAMMA, DELTA, EPSILON, etc) were forming a kind of mystical pray or hymn to the sun.
The explanation is too hermetic for my taste, but I 've never heard any other theory which could explain the order of the letters. Supposing this is a correct statement, and given that the latin alphabet is based on the greek alphabet, this might be an answer to your question.
I would like to give you some references, but I found only a couple of sites that are all in greek, none in english.
I will not start to quote you here the full names of the greek letters and their connection with the hymn, but if you are interested, post a comment and i ll post them to you.
Just to give you the idea, it goes like that:
A (ALPHA)
AL=sun
PHA=Phos=light
B (BITA)
BI=come walking (imperative form)
TA=an article which could be transcripted as to (shows direction)
Γ(GAMMA)
GA=Gea=earth
MA=simultaneously
etc.
The general meaning in a few words is "Sun, come to the earth, give us light which is life for humans, do not allow the night to win over us"...etc

Answer 5

alpha, beta are the 1st two letters of greek alphabet and so alpha is pur A and beta is our B but well before Greeks came Arabs and they invented the numbers but i fink most of the letters too. u need to go back in typographic history to find that and im studying a module in Graphic design degree on that at mo. its detailed and can get complicated. email me sometime and hopefully i will have sum answers. we actually spent last few wks on that lesson and when ur answer popped up, i cant remeber anything co zi wrote notes and thought, 'ok, too much to digest so let it go over ur head' and i did let it go over my head. i knw but i got other things in mind but if u really wanna knw, email me. i will read my notes and make sense to u about it. http://www.wam.umd.edu/~rfradkin/alphapage.html :D

Answer 6

same reason 1=1 and 1 million comes later.To have a useful system it has to have order.If a store would change how much a pound weighes any time it wants how would you know what you were buying.Logic and order are needed.

Answer 7

The alphabet is in that specific order, because if it wasn't, it wouldn't be in alphabetical order. Obviously.

Answer 8

The Modern English Alphabet’s Evolution from Egyptian Hieroglyphs

About eight symbols from the modern alphabet can be traced back in an unbroken line to Egyptian hieroglyphs. It is surmised that the other symbols were inspired by Egyptian glyphs or newly invented. Most symbols morphed to a greater or lesser degree as they went from alphabet to alphabet, confounded by writing and letters often having no fixed direction. A number of signs were dropped when the new people didn’t have a certain sound, and new signs were derived, or an old sign was employed to express a new sound.

The accompanying chart (click on the graphic) attempts to trace each letter as fully as possible. The following unfolding (really the chart’s annotation) is culled from articles, journals, popular books (noted below) and some of their references, which show that many of the theories are still quite contentious, and do change with continuous new archeological discoveries.

Egyptian ® proto-Sinaitic
In essence, the alphabet was invented by ‘Asiatics’ in Egypt around 1800 BC, by adopting some of the local hieroglyphs. The Asiatics were the various nomadic tribes occupying the present day Israel-Palestine-Jordan areas between the Babylonian, Hittite (present day Turkey), and Egyptian empires. They were present in Egypt variously as slaves, mercenaries, labour force, and resident aliens.

There were over 700 Egyptian hieroglyphs (at that time) but a subset of over 100 were glyphs that represented one, two, or three consonants. In this sense, the small one-consonant set was alphabetic. For instance, the horizontal zigzag line symbol represented net (water), and was therefore used for the letter n. And this is the idea they adopted – one symbol, one sound. It was expedient – learnable in days rather than the lifetime of study abode by Egyptian scribes. The Asiatic word for water was mayim. From the chart, we see they adopted the local glyph, and its meaning, but had that glyph represent the first letter in their own language. So the zigzag line glyph was now ‘m’ (which as the chart indicates pretty much maintained its shape and sound till today’s m).

Their alphabet spread back to their homelands (Sinai and further north). It had 24 glyphs (some think there were 27 total), which were written in arbitrary directions, and the glyphs were reversible.

Proto-Sinaitic ® Phoenician
The Asiatics’ alphabet was adopted by the Phoenicians, the earliest examples from around 1100 BC. Note that since the Phoenicians’ language was also Semitic the letter names still had meaning. The modern Hebrew alphabet (shown for reference) descends from Phoenician via the Aramaic, and Arabic is also based on this model. The Phoenician alphabet had 22 glyphs or letters, which were written right to left.

Phoenician ® Greek
The early Greek alphabet (8th century BC) is thought to have been first appropriated from the Phoenician letters by Greeks in Phoenicia (more or less the coastal zone of present day Lebanon), or Cypriots, which then spread over to Greece. They maintained most symbols, sounds, and names, but since the Greek language was different, the new Greek names had no meaning (e.g. alpha from ’aleph (ox head), beta from beth (house)). The Greeks were the first to represent vowels: ’aleph, he, yodh, and ‘ayin became the vowels a, e, i, and o, with waw splitting to become both w and the vowel u. It’s been noted that most vowel sounds result from the Greeks dropping (or not hearing) the unneeded initial guttural sound: (’)aleph®a, (h)e®e, (h)et®h, (‘)ayin®o. Other Greek sounds that Phoenicians didn’t have were added: f (f), c (ch), y (ps), and w (long o). digamma and qoppa were dropped, and four sounds (zai, semek, sade, sin) that should have become (san, sigma, zeta, xei) became (zeta, xei, san, sigma).

Greek was originally written right-to-left but later changed to left-to-right, with samples of boustrophedon during the intervening period. It has been noted that these changes coincided with the addition of vowels, and that consonantal alphabets are written from right-to-left, and syllabaries and alphabets (with vowels) are written left-to-right. I totted up about 130 scripts and found this to be about 90% true, with notable exceptions being Etruscan and Roman (initially).

The chart shows Classical Greek (5th century BC) and modern, for reference. (Cyrillic is derived from Classical Greek but without the y and w.)

Greek ® Etruscan
The Etruscans (who referred to themselves as rasna) were familiar with both the Phoenician and Greek alphabets. In 775 BC Greeks, from their largest island Euboea, settled in Ischia, an island in the Bay of Naples. It is their alphabet, a variant of early Greek, that the Etruscans adopted, but dropped the b, d, g, and o. They used the g sign, which looked like C, for the k sound, giving them three ways to write k: the C before e and i (ce, ci), the k before a (ka), and the q before u (qu). They later added the f, which looked like an 8, for a total of 24 letters, which were written right-to-left.

Etruscan ® Roman
The Romans in their rise to power made use of the Etruscan alphabet. They added back the g sound, using the C sign marked with a stroke, forming a G sign. They dropped f (ph), q (th), x (ks), c (kh), y (ps), w (long o), and added the f sound back, but used the digamma symbol. They also dropped the Y and Z, but added them back again, which is why they’re at the end. This resulted in 23 letters – all the same as our 26 minus J, U, and W – which were written left-to-right.

Roman ® modern
The Anglo-Saxons originally wrote Old English in runes but adopted the prestigious Roman script causing runes to fade away by the Norman conquest. To make up for four sounds not present in Latin, they used the wynn rune w (looks like an angular p) for their w, which was replaced by uu, and later w, in Middle English. They used the thorn rune þ for the th in theta and later added eth ð for the th in this, both of which were replaced by th in Middle English, and they used æ for the a in cat, named ash after the same sound in runes, but it also faded away. v became u and v, and i became i and j, though the full difference wasn’t accepted until the 17-19th century. Note that yogh ʒ (like a low 3 with a stretched out lower part), which appears in Middle English where we’d now find a y or gh, was until very recently used by some in their handwriting to write z, though probably it was just a version of zeta z.

References
alpha beta by John Man 2000 Wiley.
The Story of Writing by Andrew Robinson 1999 Thames & Hudson.
Lost Languages by Andrew Robinson 2002 McGraw-Hill.
The Egyptian Origin of the Semitic Alphabet Alan H. Gardiner 1911 Journal of Egyptian Archeology, Vol III.
A History of Writing by Albertine Gaur 1997 Abbeville Press.
The usual random collection of intriguing articles of varying dubiousity found on the web.

Answer 9

I'm not sure but in the bible it says Alfa and omega the beginning and the end, so i suppose alfa is the beginning as in A.??
Just a thought.

Answer 10

Put it in what ever order you want it in then tell the rest of us easy.