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Why Are Alphabet Letters Arranged How They Are?
- Drakar1903 7y agoSo that singing the alphabet song we learned as a child is more melodic.
- Wowfunhappy 7y agoIf the letters were indeed arranged in service of the alphabet song, they did a terrible job. "G" and "P" are too far apart, so the letters L–P have to be sung really fast for the rhyme to work. As a very young child, I remember thinking that "LMNO" was one letter, until I watched a Sesame Street segment which explicitly addressed this misconception. Since this segment exists, I clearly wasn't the only child who got confused.
- bhrgunatha 7y agoI like the backwards variant but it suffers the same problem. my know I now z y x me with sing you won't time next z y x, w v u t s r q p o n m l k j i h g f e d c b a
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- yesenadam 7y agoi.e. not so lmntary.
- wwwhizz 7y agoAh, the old "elemenopee"
- mmhsieh 7y agoyes, we could in theory group them by plosives and fricatives and such, but that song would sound completely whack
- gpmcadam 7y agoThey're in alphabetical order.
- coldpie 7y agoWould that this article didn't have dumb impact font memes.
- skocznymroczny 7y agoLow quality memes too.
- SamBam 7y agoIt seemed very "hello, fellow kids." All sorts of good illustrations you could use in an article on the history of the alphabet. The memes were pointless.
- blazespin 7y agoChildren use memes these days. The article and website is clearly targeted at age < 16 It's a good article for its purpose (giving kids a history lesson of our alphabet), and I imagine effective. But you have to appreciate its audience.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- JackFr 7y agoA lot of words to basically not answer the question. Honestly, he doesn't even come close.
- ndrake 7y agoThis doesn't answer the question, but it's a great TMBG song: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FRYw-pqSdKo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FRYw-pqSdKo
- codeulike 7y agoWas going to post this
- phjesusthatguy3 7y agoMy kids watched that DVD so many times That DVD taught me how to do the alphabet backwards as well as I can forwards.
- JoeAltmaier 7y agoMy Dad taught us, around the table after dinner.
- mmhsieh 7y agoto prevent old mechanical typewriters from jamming
- lkbm 7y agoThis is about why it's A B C, not why it's Q W E.
- mmhsieh 7y agoyes, if it were A B C it would jam all the time. think about it.
- ibejoeb 7y agoJokes aside, I've seen a lot of refutation of the non-alphabetical order: https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2013/05/the-lies-youve-been-told-about-the-origin-of-the-qwerty-keyboard/275537/ https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2013/05/the-l... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O_Be_2FG6F4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O_Be_2FG6F4
- mmhsieh 7y agomost of these young hackers didn't grow up with typewriters like us ancient ones so i do not blame them for not understanding. they will never know the joy of hearing wham! on the phonograph while typing a college application on a royal 7910.
- LudwigNagasena 7y ago> English is considered a very difficult language to master due to the inconsistencies in it By whom? I don’t think it would be hard for a person who knows a language from Standard Average European Sprachbund to learn English compared to, say, Chinese, Arabic or Bengali.
- jaimehrubiks 7y agoAs a person from Spain that knows multiple languages, English is in fact the easiest to learn. But I do agree that it is hard to master and that it is full of inconsistencies. In terms of pronunciation it is very complex.
- aloisdg 7y agoI though it was easy. Then through the years, I discover that English's inconsistencies are toughs, though.
- fifnir 7y agoIt has its difficulties, with the weird disconnection of spelling and pronouncing, or the phrasal verbs, but compared to any language that has proper conjugation and declension... it's a super easy language.
- aloisdg 7y agoAs a french, English is a struggle every day. Try Esperanto to see what a better language look like.
- aalleavitch 7y agoIsn't it because in Hebrew (and other ancient languages) the letters are also numbers?
- adrian_b 7y agoYes, but the numeric values were attached to the letters much later (providing a means for writing numbers), many hundreds of years after the alphabetic letter order was established.
- EugeneOZ 7y agoWhy we've made the Web like this in 2020? It's horrible, we need to fix it and never repeat these mistakes. https://imgur.com/3wX5GmV https://imgur.com/3wX5GmV - screenshot of this site when I've opened it.
- geddy 7y agoThey probably arranged them that way to match the Alphabet Song.
- kangnkodos 7y ago"Why is the alphabet in that order? Is it because of that song?" - Steven Wright
- Timpy 7y ago> English is considered a very difficult language to master due to the inconsistencies in it, as well as the different ways you can pronounce any given letter. This is a huge pet peeve of mine. The writer hedges this statement with the passive voice, and "master" is difficult to qualify, but generally speaking English is not a difficult language. I'll concede that phonics are a mess, but it's not riddled with more inconsistencies than most other world languages.
- mmhsieh 7y agowe don't have an academy to regularize rules, like the french for instance. this is why foreigners struggle because of all the exceptions. this is only if they actually care to speak english properly.
- afroboy 7y agoDespite all that exceptions in french language is mush more than in English.
- mmhsieh 7y agofrench has fourteen verb tenses, which is not optimal. it has been proven that the human mind can only handle six tenses efficiently.
- thedirt0115 7y agoI haven't heard about this six tense efficiency thing before, do you have any more information?
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- 0xff00ffee 7y agoI think you meant "much", but "mush" works when "Je ne sais pas" becomes "junsaypa", which is most of french to my ear, just a mushy blur.
- resplin 7y agoIf you find this article interesting, you would probably enjoy this great podcast about the history of English: https://historyofenglishpodcast.com/episodes/ https://historyofenglishpodcast.com/episodes/ He goes into much more detail. He has a separate audiobook that focus on the evolution of the alphabet.
- lkramer 7y ago+1 this is a really good podcast, much better than the lame article.
- epaga 7y agoWhat a frustrating article to read. tldr; "Why Are Alphabet Letters Arranged How They Are?" Because the Greeks modified the Phoenician alphabet a bit, and used that order. "Well...why was the Phoenician alphabet arranged the way it was?" <no answer>
- adrian_b 7y agoThe Latin alphabet lost a few Greek letters, but retained "F", which existed in older Greek alphabets but was lost in newer alphabets. Latin changed the pronunciation of a few letters and later added letters, at the end of the alphabet, except for "G" (which replaced an abandoned Greek letter). Before that, the Greeks took the Phoenician alphabet, which had 22 letters ending in "R", "S" and "T". The Greeks lost a few Phoenician letters and added new letters after "T". The Phoenicians inherited the alphabet from other closely related Semitic people (very little is known about those), but the Phoenician language was simplified during time and the Phoenician alphabet lost 5 letters from the older alphabet, which had 27 letters. I am not aware of an older alphabet whose order is known, besides the old 27-letter ancestor of the Phoenician alphabet. Most evidence about the letter order of the old 27-letter alphabet comes from the Ugaritic alphabet, which was also derived from it, like the Phoenician, but which replaced the graphic signs used by the older alphabet with cuneiform signs, nevertheless retaining the names and the order of the original 27 letters. The Ugaritic alphabet added 3 new letters after the original 27 letters. The names of the first 27 letters of the Ugaritic alphabet can be seen in the Unicode database (from 0x10380 to 0x1039A). Many school exercises with the Ugaritic alphabet have been unearthed, so there is no doubt about the letter order.
- adrian_b 7y agoI have forgotten to mention that my point was that all known alphabets derive their order from an ancient 27-letter Semitic alphabet, so any hypotheses about the origin of the letter order must discuss the order of the original 27 letters, not the order of the letters of more recent alphabets, which just copied the original order, then deleting some letters and adding new letters, usually at the end of the alphabet.
- 7y ago
- pabo 7y ago"So the order has ancient roots, but where does it come from? I hate to disappoint you, but we're really not sure. The practice of having the letters in an established order makes sense: It’s easier to teach and to learn. Why some ancient people put them in that specific order, though, is unknown. Whoever did it didn’t leave any record that we know of explaining why they lined the letters up like that." https://www.mentalfloss.com/article/29011/why-are-letters-abc-order https://www.mentalfloss.com/article/29011/why-are-letters-ab...
- rammy1234 7y agohttps://qz.com/india/965283/a-biography-of-the-tamil-language-reveals-its-influence-on-sanskrit-and-hebrew/ https://qz.com/india/965283/a-biography-of-the-tamil-languag.... how hebrew , sanskrit and tamil related
- letoosh 7y agoThis seems very low quality. And it ends with: > the alphabet’s letters are in that order because they have simply always been that way. Seriously? Like before the universe? Quick search leads to Wikipedia (obviously) which actually tries to answer the question: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_alphabet#Letter_names_and_order https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_alphabet#Letter... Interestingly, first sounds and "words" produced by human babies are quite similar to the sounds the starting letters of most alphabets produce ("baba", "dada", "gaga" etc): https://www.webmd.com/parenting/baby-talk-your-babys-first-words#1 https://www.webmd.com/parenting/baby-talk-your-babys-first-w... So the answer may be in biology / evolution.
- jjtheblunt 7y agoThe article doesn't seem to mention the "Futhark", which is the Runic alphabet, which _is_ the same alphabet optimized for carving into grained wood. For some reason, the old Scandinavian stylization of this alphabet is not ordered the same, since "futhark" is, like "alphabet" being the first two letters in order, "f" "u" "th" "a" "r" "k", no?
- Wowfunhappy 7y ago> Seriously? Like before the universe? Obviously, in this context, "always" means "a long time". I can understand why you'd be frustrated with how the article ends, but this strikes me as a needlessly pedantic complaint. The article can basically be summarized as "No one knows why all the letters are placed in the exact order we're familiar with today, but we can guess at the reasons behind a few letters." I found the (suspected) reasons we do know to be interesting.
- samatman 7y agoThe article answers it, in fact. Phoenician letters had to have an order, because they were also numbers. Subsequent alphabets preserved that order.
- tomThom 7y agoI recently learned Sanskrit and it was shockinh to find the order being so scientific. Guttural palatal <x> dental labial And in the order aspirated unaspirated Pretty cool.
- wsxcde 7y agoThe answer is because the script evolved and was not designed so letters appear in somewhat random order. Brahmi, which is the parent script for most Indian scripts as well as a bunch of other scripts in the region (Tibetan, Thai, Burmese, Javanese etc.), has a well-designed alphabet ordering. Simple vowels come first, followed by dipthongs, followed by constants. Consonants themselves are ordered as velar first, followed by palatals, retroflexes, dental and finally labial consonants -- notice the articulation point is moving from the back to the front of the mouth. Within each group the ordering is unvoiced, unvoiced aspirated, voiced, voiced aspirated and finally nasal consonant. It's a thing of beauty.
- JoeAltmaier 7y agoIs it true, or some strange legend, that 'ampersand' used to be at the end of the Alphabet Song? And it was written 'and per se And' meaning the 'and' sign, which was considered a letter at the time. And got sung and mangled/mondegreened into 'ampersand'?
- yesenadam 7y agoFrom etymonline.com: ampersand. (n) 1837, contraction of and per se and, meaning '&' by itself is 'and' (a hybrid phrase, partly in Latin, partly in English). An earlier form of it was colloquial ampassy (1706). The distinction is to avoid confusion with "&" in such formations as "&c.", a once common way of writing "etc." (the et in et cetera is Latin for "and"). The letters a, I, and o also formerly (15c.-16c.) were written a per se, etc., especially when standing alone as words. The symbol is based on the Latin word et "and," and comes from an old Roman system of shorthand signs (ligatures) attested in Pompeiian graffiti... In old schoolbooks the ampersand was printed at the end of the alphabet and thus by 1880s the word ampersand had acquired a slang sense of "posterior, rear end, hindquarters." https://www.etymonline.com/word/ampersand https://www.etymonline.com/word/ampersand
- logfromblammo 7y agoRight here is when Tevye jumps in and starts singing "tradition!" It's because ancestor and cousin scripts used the phonetic glyphs for numbers as well, and the ordering had to be fixed. Once Indo-Arabic numerals made it in to the character set, the need for strict ordering went away. But now that characters have numeric values again (ASCII, Unicode), they're fixed forever.
- barnaclejive 7y agoCan we stop putting dumb memes in blog post in 2020?