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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?
The idiot also known as Capfka ...
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now I know my DKSs?? nope... doesn't fit the melody. 
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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.
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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: =================== 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. =================== 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
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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
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>F, U, Þ, A, R, K... I suppose it's no coincidence that this particular ordering gives us 'futhark', a runic approach.
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The Pooh-Bah I suppose(s) it's no coincidence ...
Nor that the þird "letter" is Þ.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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