who/how alphabetized the alphabet for the English language? Is it random or is there some sort of guiding principle I’m unaware of? Bonus points if there’s actually a ‘better’ alphabetical order out there?

Question

who/how alphabetized the alphabet for the English language? Is it random or is there some sort of guiding principle I’m unaware of? Bonus points if there’s actually a ‘better’ alphabetical order out there?

In: 4505

Answer 1

Season 47 episode 13 of Nova, “A to Z: The First Alphabet” was awesome giving the history of the Modern English alphabet and all the other alphabets that derived from the same Phonecian origin. Interestingly, Canaanites adapted Egyptian hieroglyphics and that is the base of most writing systems and brought it to the Phoenicians. For example, the Egyptian symbol for ox was a stylized ox head (an ox head with horns like an upside-down upper case “A”), and the Hebrew word for ox was aleph, so the symbol for the “A” sound was an ox head that was eventually stylized into an upside down A, rotated sideways by the greeks, and then upended by the Romans to become the modern letter A in our alphabet. Originally though it was an egyptian hieroglyph.