• Question: Is there any reason why letters have to be in a specific order in the alphabet?

    Asked by 782yttc52 to Anna, Hayley, Iain, Rebecca on 19 Jun 2015.
    • Photo: Iain Bethune

      Iain Bethune answered on 19 Jun 2015:

      I don’t think so, but I’ll leave the final answer to the linguist! Certainly different languages have different alphabets entirely.

    • Photo: anon

      anon answered on 20 Jun 2015:

      Our current (Latin) alphabet has its roots in the Phoenician Alphabet, which dates back to the 8th century BC. Interestingly, our letters are still very similar to the letters of the Phoenician Alphabet – this animation shows the evolution of our alphabet, and as you can see: the order in which we arrange our letters has hardly changed over the past almost 3000 years: http://terpconnect.umd.edu/~rfradkin/latin.html

      However, as Iain said, we don’t the why the letters are in their specific order in the alpahabet or if there is a reason for this at all. There might have been a reason for arranging the letters this way at some point, which we haven’t discovered yet, or it might just be a random order, which we have kept for ages.

Comments