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AZTECAMAN asked in Society & CultureLanguages · 1 decade ago

Who was responsible for organizing the alphabet in its current order?

3 Answers

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  • Taivo
    Lv 7
    1 decade ago
    Favorite Answer

    The basic order of our alphabet goes back 3500 years to when the ancestors of the Phoenicians and Hebrews invented it. No one really knows why the letters are in the particular order they are. There have been a lot of guesses, but they are just guesses. When the Greeks borrowed the alphabet from the Phoenicians they kept the same basic order and added a few letters at the end. The Romans got the alphabet from the Etruscans (who got it from the Greeks) and only made a couple of very minor changes to the order. We have kept the Roman order (and added a couple of letters). All languages that use the Roman alphabet use the same basic order. Even the Cyrillic alphabet (based on the Greek alphabet) uses the basic Phoenician/Greek order of letters. And then there are the Hebrew and Arabic alphabets that retain the same basic order of letters as well. It's actually convenient that so many languages use the same basic order of letters.

    Source(s): I am a Linguistics professor at a major US university
  • 5 years ago

    To begin, the "character who wrote the alphabet" did not write the whole thing. It's now not like in the future any individual stated, "Hey, we want phrases and letters so allow's get to writing them." The evolution of writing have to be spoken of if I can start to speak approximately the writing of our alphabet. The very origins of writing started as sensible drawings. Cave drawings are by and large brought up because the beginnings of written language. Simplistic drawings have been then tailored to face for phrases and terms. You would draw 3 squiggly strains to face for water and whatever concerning water. The egyptians took this suggestion farther by means of developing distinct figures to face for extra distinct phrases and terms. So you'll have an emblem for ingesting water, walking water and placid water alternatively of simply water. This used to be then built right into a larger likeness of writing. Some languages stopped at this factor and allowed symbols to face for letters or sounds as is noticeable within the Japanese language amongst others to these days. We can thank the old Greek civilizations for far of our writing and phrases and our alphabet. Have you ever idea of what the phrase "alphabet" is? It's a compilation of the primary 2 letters of the Greek alphabet alpha and beta. The Greek alphabet is similar to the present alphabet we use in these days. The Greek alphabet consisted of 24 letters and we've best further 2 to that quantity to get our possess alphabet. Every letter makes distinct sounds and combos of letters can difference the sound of the distinct letters. Try making a legitimate you could not constitute with letters. This is how we bought the alphabet we've in these days. No unmarried guy got here up with phrases and letters, it used to be a collaboration of hundreds of thousands of humans over hundreds and hundreds of years.

  • Anonymous
    1 decade ago

    Evolution is responsible; however, The International Organization for Standardization (ISO) encapsulated the Latin alphabet in their (ISO/IEC 646) standard.

    Please refer to--

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Latin_alphabet

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