• Question: who decided that A,B,C, was alphabetical order ?

    Asked by ammaarah to Adam, Catherine, Karen, Leila, Nazim on 12 Mar 2012.
    • Photo: Adam Stevens

      Adam Stevens answered on 10 Mar 2012:

      Our alphabet is based largely on ancient Greek, which starts alpha, beta, gamma. Obviously there have been lots of changes over the years and influences from different places.

      But ancient Greek letters would have been based on Babylonian, which was the first alphabet not to use pictures of things to represent words (we call it cuneform).

      So I don’t think any one person or group of people chose ABC, it’s just one of those things that has been built up over thousands of years.

    • Photo: Leila Battison

      Leila Battison answered on 10 Mar 2012:

      There’s a lot of history in the evolution of alphabets, and ours (Latin-Roman) is just one of hundreds of related systems that trace their history back to the Egyptian Hieroglyphics. Not all alphabets today have the same order, but our ABC order was first recorded over 3400 years ago in a cunieform writing system. At this time, none of the letters looked the same as they do today, but the sounds they represented were the same.

      It wasn’t recorded who put them in this order, or whether it was just a chance list that was translated time and time again and it got stuck. Not all the alphabets today have the same order – the Russian Cyrillic alphabet goes A B V G D E …

    • Photo: Karen Masters

      Karen Masters answered on 12 Mar 2012:

      No idea – Adam and Leila seemed to answer it great though. Very interesting. 😉

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