h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

You seem just the person, Gnomon, to answer what I've always wondered; who originally decided on the order of the alphabet, and why?

If you don't know, I think I'll assume it's unknown!

Hi Polly Math. Are you still around? I see you dropped back to the site recently, so you might call in again.

You asked me a question in 2003 but I only just noticed it now, so I'll attempt to answer it.

Why is the alphabet the order it is?

The answer is really that we don't know. In about 1100 BC, the Northern Semitic people (living in the what is now Israel, Lebanon and Syria) settled on an alphabet of 22 letters which correspond roughly to 22 of the letters in our alphabet. The sounds of these letters were roughly the following:

(a) b g d h w z hh th y k l m n s (a) p ss q r sh t

We don't know why they chose the order they did for their letters. The two a's are sounds that don't exist in our alphabet but are close to an a sound. The hh is a strong h and the ss is a strong s. While this alphabet doesn't look much like ours, you can see some resemblance - a b something d at the start and later you have k l m n. At the end is p something q r sh t.

Since that time, though, we know what happened. The Northern Semitic alphabet was adopted by the Greeks who passed it on to the Etruscans who in turn passed it on to the Etruscans. Each time the alphabet was passed on, it was changed slightly:

1. when there were sounds in the new language which needed new letters, these were added on the end. So after T we got U V W X Y and Z.

2. when sounds existed in the older alphabet which weren't needed in the newer, the letter was sometimes just dropped, so we lost the original z, hh, th etc. The z was later added back in again because it was needed again, so it was added at the end.

3. sometimes when new sounds were needed, existing letters were changed. The Greeks had no aleph sound, the first (a) in the alphabet, but they needed an 'a' sound, so they used the aleph letter for a and the first letter of the alphabet became A.

Hope this makes sense.

Sorry for the long delay in answering your question.

... the Etruscans who in turn passed it on to the Romans...