WHY IS THE ALPHABET IN ALPHABETICAL ORDER?

I. We always use letters for writing and we always don't pay attention to letters. May be you think that was not very important or you were lazy. But when we learn a language we must learn Alphabet and we always do that. Actually this is the first step of learning language. If you couldn't think about alphabetical order when you were first grade's pupil, could you answer now?

“Why is the Alphabet in alphabetical order?”

If you don't know it, I can answer. Certainly today I am going to tell you about English Alphabet. Because contest is going in English. We are students learning foreign languages for teaching we should know about it. Anytime our pupils will be able to ask this question.

II. Well, firstly we should repeat English Alphabet.

A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z

This is standardized alphabetical order. But why is it in this order? Why we can't start as “G R F D L O B A I M G” and etc. Why? Because it had this order for millenniums? Or someone created it and that order was kept? Who is that someone? Greeks or Romans?

No, they are Phoenicians. Phoenicians are one of the alphabet's founders. The first letters belong to Egyptians, Sumerians, Akkadians. But they didn't have an order like alphabet. On old pages of history Phoenicians created it. The Phoenician alphabet was derived from Egyptian hieroglyphs and became one of the most widely used writing systems, spread by Phoenician merchants across the Mediterranean world, where it evolved and was assimilated by many other cultures. The Paleo-Hebrew alphabet was directly derived from Phoenician. Another derivative script is the Aramaic alphabet, which was the ancestor of the modern Arabic script. The Modern Hebrew script is a stylistic variant of the Aramaic script. The Greek alphabet (and by extension its descendants such as the Latin, the Cyrillic, and the Coptic) was also derived from Phoenician. By the way, English alphabet was derived from Latin. I am sure you know about it. But you may ask “if Phoenicians created it first, how would they create an order?”

(Picture)

They made it like this one. The Phoenician alphabet, called by convention the Proto-Canaanite alphabet for inscriptions older than around 1050 BC, is the oldest verified alphabet.

Phoenician uses a system of acrophony to name letters. The names of the letters are essentially the same as in its parental scripts, which are in turn derived from the word values of the original hieroglyph for each letter. The original word was translated from Egyptian into its equivalent form in the Semitic language, and then the initial sound of the translated word became the letter's value.

(Theodor Nöldeke, Yigael Yadin, Aron Demsky)

By this alphabetical order we can read a legend of Phoenicians.

“Aleph”- ox, it means westsemit's supreme God Baal often depicted in the form of a bull.

“With support of God Baal they had begun great trip from home to the world. They had prayed and prepared their weapons. They went up by stairs to the sun and helped each other holding their hands. They eats fish from the sea. Their support is Great Eye and their experiences will retain for millenniums. They will written on papyrus, on every minds, on every mouth as sign of wisdom.”

According to Herodotus, Phoenician prince Cadmus was accredited with the introduction of the Phoenician alphabet—phoinikeia grammata, "Phoenician letters"—to the Greeks, who adapted it to form their Greek alphabet, which was later introduced to the rest of Europe. Herodotus, who gives this account, estimates that Cadmus lived sixteen hundred years before his time, or around 2000 BC. However, Herodotus' writings are not used as a standard source by contemporary historians. The Greek alphabet is derived from the Phoenician alphabet. The phonology of Greek being different from that of Phoenician, the Greeks modified the Phoenician script to better suit their language. It was possibly more important in Greek to write out vowel sounds: Phoenician being a Semitic language, words were based on consonantal roots that permitted extensive removal of vowels without loss of meaning, a feature absent in the Indo-European Greek. (Or perhaps, the Phoenicians were simply following the lead of the Egyptians, who never wrote vowels. After all, Akkadian cuneiform, which wrote a related Semitic language, always indicated vowels.) In any case, the Greeks adapted the signs of the Phoenician consonants not present in Greek; each such name was shorn of its leading sound, and the sign took the value of the now leading vowel. For example, ??leph, which designated a glottal stop in Phoenician, was re-purposed to represent the vowel /a/; he became /e/, ?et became /e?/ (a long vowel), `ayin became /o/ (because the pharyngeality altered the following vowel), while the two semi-consonants wau and yod became the corresponding high vowels, /u/ and /i/. (Some dialects of Greek, which did possess /h/ and /w/, continued to use the Phoenician letters for those consonants as well.)

III. By these ways so many languages use this alphabet, but so many peoples don't know about history of alphabetic order. But now you are getting this miracle answer of this question.

Good luck to everybody!