About the alphabet English that is?

Question

Why does it go a, b ,c d ,e..... Why not B through Z with the vowels at the end a, e , i, o, u (and sometimes y)?
Was the alphabet made first and the the vowel picked at random?
It may sound like a stupid question but who decided the order and why?
Please answer if you can all these questions thanks for your time.

Answer 1

'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 (a group that also includes Hebrew and Aramaic).

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 exactly who first established this order nor why. . . . though the decision to HAVE a set order was probably to make teaching it easier.

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

-----------------

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 along with the letters themselves from the seafaring traders of Phoenicia.

Nor, contrary to some popular sources, did the Phoenicians invent this system themselves. They 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, something not indicated in the original Semitic alphabet. (Note that this also explains the haphazard position of these vowels in the Greek and later alphabets).

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" were variants of the same letter, and "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).

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.

It is possible, then, 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.

Answer 2

How the alphabet came about begins so far back that any opinion is just that, an opinion that can not be cross-checked with one correct answer only. It evolved from what went before, other alphabets, other civilizations. Travellers, invaders and explorers brought new ideas home with them which were intermingled with what was there already in the same way that English today contains many foreign words in general use, imported from other languages .

English has 26 letters, other languages have fewer or more - sometimes many more. There are no hard and fast answers, but the order in English follows pretty closely the ancient Greek.

Answer 3

Good question. Kind of hard answer. I know, from Latin class, that alphabet comes alphabetum. That originates from the ancient greek word "alphabetos". So, we've got the word "alphabet" from the Greek words "alpha" and "beta", and it also continues with derivatives from the Greek, Cyrillic and Hebrew language.

Answer 4

Honestly, I don't think anyone person decided all that. A language forms by people using it daily and then taking out what they don't like or don't use. Also, influences from other cultures form language. English has had so many influences from other languages that I think over time people cut out what they didn't like or added in what worked for them. Take our current language, how many new words have been added to the dictionary because they are used so often? It wasn't just one person, but groups of people using new words.

Answer 5

A Greek man: Aristotle Alfabetikos

Answer 6

Okay..don't even worry about this. The alphabet it already made and here in this world and every english speaking person uses it. Just deal with the fact that it is what it is.

Answer 7

It started with the Phoenician alphabet, then Greek, then Hebrew, then Arabic, then Latin.

Answer 8

okaaay???....look just be glad that you didn't have to make it :]]