Why is A the first letter of the Alphabet?

Question

and B 2nd, etc

Answer 1

First, about the straightdope article

It is pretty good as an overview, but a bit off in some key points. Most important point --- yes, we DO have evidence that the people of Ugarit used this basic order, but there is NO evidence that they were the ones to INVENT that order.

In fact, it seems unlikely. This theory would imply that the order somehow then spread throughout the region to all the other groups already using some form of this alphabet and that they ALL decided to adapt it, because it was used in Ugarit. From all we know itis NOT very likely Ugarit had that kind of influence on all their neighbors.

Very likely the order goes back much closer to the invention of the letters themselves. (See more below.)

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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 the 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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Why ANY order?

A more basic question would be why an order to this collection of letters was developed in the first place. Again, we don't know the details. . . though perhaps those Ugaritic SCHOOL tablets give us a hint. Then, as now, they felt the need/desire to organize the letters in a consistent way to be to TEACH the system to students as they began to learn how to write.

Answer 2

Because alphabetically A comes before all the other letters.

Answer 3

Oh, come on. What a question!

A B C?
It's easy as 1 2 3!

Answer 4

"Why is the alphabet in that order? Is it because of that song? ... Guy who wrote that song wrote everything."

-Steven Wright

Answer 5

http://www.straightdope.com/columns/070302.html

Answer 6

becaue it's A okay

Answer 7

b/c of greeks

Answer 8

because it comes before b,c,d,e,f,g,h,i,j,k,l,m,n,o,p,q,r,s,t,u,v,w,x,y, and z.. therefore, it must be first.