Alphabet, Abjad and so forth

[James E. Clapp]

Jim Landau started a somewhat complex discussion by writing:

> The following was pointed out to me by Robert Birch of the National
> Agricultural Library:
>
> Set up the Latin alphabet in the following tableau
>
>       A      B       C          D
>       E      F       G          -  H
>       I              K             L,M,N
>       O      P       Q  R   S   T
>       U      V       X  Y   Z
>
> and you will see that . . .
>
> Conclusion:  way back when (circa 1500 BC) the scribes who started using
> the alphabet knew enough about phonetics to sort the alphabet by related
> sounds.


Mr. Birch joins a long line of people fascinated by the alphabet.  The
origin and development of our writing system (and related systems as
seemingly different from ours as Arabic, Hebrew, and the many scripts of
India) have been the subject of generations of impressive scholarship and
any number of books.  To see how much was known even in the nineteenth
century, see Isaac Taylor's classic two-volume treatise "The Alphabet: An
Account of the Origin and Development of Letters" (1883).  (For nice
overviews, see the sections in Volume I on "The Genealogy of the English
Alphabet" and "The Alphabetic Order.")

Perhaps the most basic reason why Mr. Birch's theory fails is that it is
based upon the distribution of vowels.  The Semitic alphabet those scribes
were using had no vowels.  When the Greeks adopted it they kept
the order of the letters; but since some of the letters represented sounds
that were not used in their language, somebody had the bright idea of
putting those letters to use to represent vowel sounds, which otherwise
were not represented.  So the distribution of vowels, and of other
letters in relation to them, is purely fortuitous.  (And of course, the
alphabet has undergone a number of changes since ancient Greek times, as
well.)

Just how the order of the Phoenician alphabet (immediate progenitor of the
Greek) was established can never be determined with exactness.  The best
current synthesis of scholarship on the question, so far as I know, is in
G.R. Driver's book "Semitic Writing: From Pictograph to Alphabet"
(originally published in 1944; 'newly revised edition' edited by S.A.
Hopkins, Oxford Univerity Press, 1976)--specifically the section entitled
"The order of the letters of the alphabet" (and don't overlook the extensive
"Additions and Corrections" section in the back of the book).  In a
nutshell:

          "The order of the letters in the Phoenician alphabet
          is based not on any single, for example the phonetic,
          principle . . . but on three principles, namely the
          nature of the sound, the form of the sign and the
          meaning of the name . . . ."  (pp. 271-272).

Thus--just as might happen if we ourselves were arranging a list of words
for ease of memorization--various groups of letters are indeed related by
sound (sometimes the sound represented by the letter, sometimes the sound of
the name of the letter), and others by other mnemonically convenient
principles (like putting the letters whose names were "cricket" and "monkey"
together, and letters whose names meant "eye" and "mouth" together).

It was not until around the fourth century BC that stunningly modern
phonetic analysis made possible a reordering of the consonants into neat
rows and columns according where the sound was made in the mouth (the rows)
and whether it was voiced or unvoiced, aspirated or unaspirated, continuant,
and the like (the columns).  Unfortunately for us, that intellectual
achievement occurred in India, too far away and too late to influence the
order of the Greek alphabet.  So we are stuck with an alphabet that is
pretty much in random order (except in a historical sense), but at least it
includes letters for the vowels; South and Southeast Asian alphabets derived
from the Indic offshoot of the original Semitic writing systems have neatly
organized alphabets based upon scientific phonetic principles, but generally
lack full-fledged letters for the vowels sounds.

James E. Clapp
Author, Random House Webster's Dictionary of the Law