As I was driving home this evening. Sorry, I'll read that again. I was stationary, held up by an accident, on my way home tonight, waiting for the paramedics to cart the injured away from an accident, the tow-truck to cart off the vehicular carcases and the police to arrest everybody concerned on the off-chance a crime had been committed. Anway, it occurred to me that we quite happily accept that the order of the alphabet should be ABCDEFG .... XYZ. It made me wonder why.
Can anyone come up with a half-way credible rationale for our blind acceptance of this order? What's wrong with DKSIFL...BQP?
now I know my DKSs?? nope... doesn't fit the melody.
It is, my good CG, possibly purely arbitrary. It may just as well have been B, L, N, F, S, H, D, T, C, M, G, Ng, R... or F, U, Þ, A, R, K, W, H, N, I, J, E, P, Z, S, T, B, E*, M, L, Ng, O, D. On the other hand, it may have had some mystical significance to the ancient Semites and have suffered only minor modifications by the poor benighted, unenlightened Greeks and Romans.
*Yes, I know there are two Es in here. They're different Es.
the order of the alphabet should be ABCDEFG .... XYZ. It made me wonder why.Nice one CK. I know it goes a long way back but how and when?? I googled and found an intersting and new to me at least theory at
http://www.lexiline.de/lexiline/lexi29.htm which suggests:
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The modern "order" of the alphabet perhaps originated in a mnemonic funeral prayer (Alpha to Omega, beginning to end)
which gave it the A,B,C etc. order we have today. This mnemonic prayer
may have been Indo-European and related to Hebrew words for numbers.
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Any takers?
Helen (of Troy) or any one else, can you confirm/correct my memory that the pair of lions/dogs guarding the temple gates in Japan represent Ah and Om, beginning (with open mouth) and end (with closed mouth).
And on a lighter note: A Norwegian female rugby team (Union not League so 15 not 13 players) were playing away with their male colleagues. After the match they partied but the men got drunk and wanted to go home, while the women wanted one last dance. The headline of the report in the local paper read;
Fjord Nymphs XV beg quick waltz.
Being all 26 letters only once. A little contrived but acceptable methinks. (Rugby teams are known as "XV"s at least in UK).
Rod
order of alphabet possibly purely arbitrary
An additional question is when and why did it become necessary to impose an order, turning the set of letters into a particular sequence? Was it to provide a standard way of teaching, or to provide a standard order for inventories of some kind (early pigeon loft directories perhaps?)
Rod
>F, U, Þ, A, R, K...
I suppose it's no coincidence that this particular ordering gives us 'futhark', a runic approach.
The Pooh-Bah I suppose(s) it's no coincidence ...
Nor that the þird "letter" is Þ.
The order is extremely important, as in many ancient languages, including Hebrew and Greek, there were no numerals -- the alphabetic characters were used for numbers. This gave rise to the Kabbala and its various versions which interpret words by their numeric equivalent.
C.K., I got to wondering (she said in Southern U.S. idiom)
if perhaps heiroglyphics might have played a part in this.
I found this site:
http://www.torstar.com/rom/egypt/It says that one type of heiroglyph was intended to represent the
sounds of the spoken word. So it makes sense to me that these symbols would have been drawn in the same order that they were spoken.
So, continuing that thought, I wonder if other early languages got written in the order that the sounds were spoken, and if that somehow got "translated" by the most
common groupings or something, into rudimentary alphabets as we know them. A stretch, I know--wish I were a real
researcher, but I'm sure someone-who-shall-remain-nameless knows where to look.
I'm sure someone-who-shall-remain-nameless knows where to look.
Assuming that you meant NicholasW, I ran off to his other haunt, and did a search for "alphabet history" and found nothing. I could find no threads (called nodes over there) on the development of alphabets. I hope that Ole Nick himself will join the fray on this one.
An additional question is when and why did it become necessary to impose an order, turning the set of letters into a particular sequence? Was it to provide a standard way of teaching, or to provide a standard order for inventories of some kind (early pigeon loft directories perhaps?)Well yes. Rod's additional clarifications of my question are very welcome. This is part of what I'd like to know.
I am aware that the Greek alphabet has always been taught in English speaking countries as alpha, beta, delta, gamma, etc. I wonder if this because of our alphabetic order, or is our alphabetic order in part a product of the Greek order?
If, as has been suggested, the order is purely abitrary, I'd like to know when that arbitrary order became the inflexible norm ...
...I'd like to know when that arbitrary order became the inflexible norm ...
Sweet C.K., I fear that topic may be imperscrutable (thanks, tsuwm).
The Greek, Etruscan, and Roman alphabets (in that order) took on the Semitic order and kept it basically unchanged. This makes sense for Semitic and Greek where they were used as numerals, but it's just tradition in the case of the Romans. When they dropped zeta, the sixth letter, as unneeded, that left a gap in sixth place. So when they invented G by sticking a bit on C, they out it in the first available gap.
The original Semitic order I can't explain, and have never heard a theory on it, but I believe it was pretty rigidly adhered to across the different Semitic peoples that used it over the ages.
The modern Arabic alphabet has changed it by grouping together all the letters that are identical apart from dots (such as B, T, and Th), but even they still use the original Semitic when using them as numerals: i.e. the letters now go A B T Th J H Kh D Dh... but they number things as (a) (b) (j) (d)...
The import of the mesopotamian cuneiform and subsequent Phoenician/Hittite/Sumerian alphabets cannot be overestimated on this count. It had a profound influence on all of the languages of the region (and beyond), even borrowed to create (with some loaners from futhorc runes) the Visigoth script. Also good to remember that so many of the world's languages didn't have alphabets of their own until relatively recently. Even Armenian, considered its own subgroup of Indo-European, didn't get its own alphabet until 410 CE, and it shows distinct influences from the Greek.
It's this little group of Semitic languages that've formed the basis of alphabets from Mongolia to Mali (and almost assuredly beyond).
If the Germanic peoples got their fuþ*ark from the Etruscans (or whomever) why did they change the order so radically? They did assign much magical powers to the runes, so presumably they re-ordered it for reasons of their own, but what were those reasons?
The other alphabet that I referred to above (in flat mode, below in threaded) was the Irish tree alphabet (BLNFS...); the letter names were the names of trees that had some characteristic that was representative of a certain month (cf. Graves, Robert The White Goddess) The order was from the winter solstice on.
*For those of you who with thorn challenged computers, such as Macs, that character *was a thorn and not an eff-aye ligature or other curious character.
I can't steer you to an online source, CK, but I can recommend The Alphabet Abecedearium; Some Notes on Letters, Richard A Firmage (David R Godine, Publisher, 1993), for a beginner's book on the development of the English alphabet.
Sorry, I was unclear/incomplete in my explanation. The Visigoths got their alphabet from the Phoenicians (via Roman and Greek), with some futhorc runes thrown in to represent the elements of Germanic languages that Phoenician (a Semitic language) wasn't equipped to handle. Germanic tribes of course had their runes from well before that. This was the monk Ulfilas in about the 3rd C. CE.
Anyone happen to know offhand whether there's even an extended ascii code for the eth and the thorn?
[Edition]
One source is of at least passing interest online is a SIL/WBT site at
http://www.jaars.org/museum/alphabet/
Thanks for the input from y'all. I suspected it was historical, as I said in the original post, but just how historical didn't cross my mind.