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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 ... 
The idiot also known as Capfka ...
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Carpal Tunnel
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...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).
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enthusiast
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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)...
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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).
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Carpal Tunnel
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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.
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Pooh-Bah
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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.
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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/
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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.
The idiot also known as Capfka ...
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