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The word 'alphabet' is supposed to come from the first two letters of the Greek version. But who came up with the idea of ordering the letters? There's no real reason for them to have a particular order, at least not until you invent the idea of indexing by letter, which doesn't occur until quite late. (Even then, humans being what they are, it would have been quite possible for each dictionary to use an idiosyncratic order.) It's not as though there's any actual benefit to memorising the letters, you just need to know the sounds.
Posts: 10645 | Registered: Jul 2004
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KoM, I've been asking this same question for years, and have not yet found the answer. I'm interested in seeing if Hatrack can flush it out.
Posts: 10397 | Registered: Jun 2005
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Why is a rose named rose? (Yes, I'm stealing from Shakespeare: Juliet: What's in a name? That which we call a rose by any other name would smell as sweet.) Here, have fun reading for a while: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AlphabetPosts: 1132 | Registered: Jul 2002
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Well, really, "alpha" and "beta" come from "aleph" and "bet," which were Phoenician.
(Looks at above post and realizes that info was there. Oops.)
In other news, I once had a professor tell me the alphabet song is also Phoenician in origin. Pretty cool, eh?
Posts: 3932 | Registered: Sep 1999
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I used to be hooked on Phonics, but after detox and rehab, I've been off the stuff for three years, seven months, and 18 days, now.
Posts: 10397 | Registered: Jun 2005
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Well, you would have to have the letters in order if they are going to be the lyrics to a song. So maybe the ordering of the alphabet goes back that far?
Posts: 364 | Registered: Dec 2005
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You know, my take on this is probably influenced by having a two-year-old. But we learn a lot by repetition and recitation. When the alphabet was invented, it had to be taught to be of any use, right? The oldest learning tricks in the book are songs and recitation. Putting them in an order that can be learned is the first step to teaching what they are and what they are for. When a child learns the alphabet and to read, he or she usually first learns the names of letters without meaning, then learns sight recognition of (and sometimes how to write) the letters, then learns what sounds the letters make, then how to string the sounds together to make the sounds of words. It's a tried-and-true process that has been followed by countless generations (although some kids skip around and/or do different learning tasks concurrently, as well.) The reason that the alphabet is ordered, to me, has a lot to do with learning.
But again, my perspective may be completely warped because I have a daughter who is in the process of learning the alphabet (mainly the song.)
Posts: 21182 | Registered: Sep 2004
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Deciding to create a written language is a conscious act. The ones based on an alphabet of arbitrary symbols (as opposed to writing using pictograms) probably sprang from a fairly organized mind to begin with. If your going to go to all the trouble of inventing symbols for sounds and string them together to make words, it probably makes sense to come up with an ordered list of those symbols.
It's artificial, not something that evolved organically.
And the person or persons responsible were most likely accountants or royal recorders.
Posts: 22497 | Registered: Sep 2000
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Not something I know a whole lot about, but in at least some ancient cultures, the letters also stood for numbers. That would suggest an obvious ordering.
Posts: 10177 | Registered: Apr 2001
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Yes, but it assumes the assignment to numbers was in there from the start. I could be wrong, but it is my impression that this was a rather later invention than the actual alphabet.
Posts: 10645 | Registered: Jul 2004
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I think agree that it simply makes sense that in order to teach the alphabet to others, such as children, an established order would have to be established.
Something as little in number as 26 could easily be ordered.
I think this is why Chinese characters are not ordered at all, you just learn all 2000 required for moderate fluency, starting at basic words and moving on into the more complex. The only way you can really order them is by radicals (of which there are more than 26), how often they are used in speech, or by how many strokes. Again none of these systems really make for a uniform list.
Posts: 14316 | Registered: Jul 2005
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According to wikipedia, alpha and beta were also used by the greeks as the numerals for 1 and 2. Doesn't say anything about how they came to represent those numbers, but I guess it makes sense that they would be placed first in the alphabet as well. That said, I have no idea whether their placement in the alphabet is due to their numerical values, or whether the opposite is true.
Posts: 2437 | Registered: Apr 2005
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I saw the title and thought of particles. For some reason the Helium nucleus is called an alpha particle, and a bare electron is a beta ray. Gamma rays are high energy photons, basically hopped up light. After that it gets more complicated. The other one we concern ourselves with is the neutron, which is usually represented by a roman letter n. I think a greek nu stands for neutrino, doesn't it?
Speaking of weird numbering schemes? How about those chemists who say Hydrogen, Helium, Lithium, and so on for one, two, three protons in the nucleus? Posts: 6246 | Registered: Aug 2004
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I was going to post something about catching a Stargate SG-1 episode involving a room filled with gamma rays, and how my first thought was "wait, gamma rays are dangerous with too much exposure" because of a short story by Isaac Asimov, but I didn't because I thought it would be too nerdy. But thinking "Boron" in response to "Fifth Element" instead of, obviously, the quintessential element of the soul in addition to the four normal ones of air, water, earth, and fire is waaaaaay nerdier.
Posts: 283 | Registered: Jul 2006
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