I saw this as a joke somewhere, but it got me wondering what the answer was. Why is the alphabet in that order? Who decided A was the first letter, B was the second, and so on? –Eric S., via e-mail
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The alphabet used in English, and with some variations in most other European languages, comes from Semitic speakers who adapted it from Egyptian hieroglyphics about 4,000 years ago. The rudiments of modern alphabetic order first appeared about 600 years later in Syria. With minor changes in letter order at each step, the alphabet passed from the Semites (including the Canaanites, Hebrews, and Phoenicians) to the Greeks to the Etruscans to the forebears of the Romans to us. As for the identity of the sage who first ordered it, and why that order, your guess is as good as mine.
The roots of ABC order are found in the cuneiform script of Ugaritic, the Semitic language of an ancient city in Syria. The letter shapes of this script aren’t obviously related to our alphabet’s direct ancestors, but the alphabetic order from a 14th-century BC inscription is virtually identical to later Hebrew and Phoenician letter lists, and the letter names are related.
So the roots of ABC order trace back to 14th-century BC Ugaritic. But why that order? Scholars don’t know, but that hasn’t stopped them from pulling wild guesses out of their urtexts. There’s some slight, possibly coincidental correspondence between the meanings of the Semitic names of adjacent letters–for example, the yod-kaph-lamed sequence, meaning “hand, palm, cattle prod.” Other explanations involve astrology, Sumerian musical scales, and divine intervention; one knucklehead even proposed that the Phoenicians named and ordered their letters after the days of the month in the Mayan calendar. Damn foolishness, all of it. The point isn’t what order the alphabet is in, but that it’s in order at all.
