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

The order of Roman letters, Greek letters, Cyrillic, and Arabic and Hebrew and related scripts all date back to the Phoenician script, where it seems to appear out of nowhere with no apparent rationale. As far as we can tell, it’s entirely arbitrary. (All scripts derived from Phoenician whose ancestry isn’t via Brahmi have this order; in Brahmi and its descendants the letters are organised by the properties of the sounds they represent.)

I’m not sure if there’s such a thing as a ‘better’ alphabetical order – what would make one order ‘better’ than another? There certainly are ways to order letters in a script that aren’t arbitrary, but it’s not clear if those would make ordering things work ‘better’ than any other order.