Why is alphabetical order

See also: Is it true that English has the most words of any language? Why is the alphabet arranged the way it is? Word of the day. Trending Words Most popular in the world. Are You Learning English? Basic Guidelines For English Spellings. But they had to adapt it to fit Greek pronunciation. Greek did not have an "h" sound, for instance, but it did need a letter to represent the "e" sound. So, since the Phoenicians didn't have an E, the Greeks recycled the Phoenician letter H to write the "e" sound.

Later on, Latin speakers needed an alphabet that fit their own language. They took the Etruscan adaptation of the Greek alphabet and made some changes to fit Latin. After some time, Latin speakers realized they needed separate letters for the "g" and "k" sounds, so they added a stroke to C, creating G. They then stuck G after F in the alphabetical order to replace an obsolete Greek letter.

So, while we don't know who first started putting the alphabet in alphabetical order, we do know that the Phoenicians had an alphabetical order thousands of years ago that was already close to ours. That alphabetical order changed over time as letters were adapted, recycled, and created to meet the needs of languages like Greek and Latin. You can read more about the history of the alphabet at the link below.

Note that these are considered unique letters in Swedish, just as much as their Dano-Norwegian counterparts. The Danes of course already had had as much German as they could stand.

They used to be ordered mostly as ae oe ue sz and are now mostly ordered as a o u ss. But such things as pocket-sized organizers, if they still exist, can even have separate pages for sch and st. Going through that catalog is a surreal experience. Traditional-Mongolian alphabet song with two transcriptions. You would sort papers by slipping them between the cards. The Inner Mongolian alphabetical order looks like the current Japanese syllabary order, but reading from right to left across each column, rather than down each row.

The Japanese equivalent would be: a ka sa ta na ha ma ya ra wa, e ke se te ne he me [y]e re [w]e, …. According to Wikipedia , the current ordering of Hangul is based on a ordering introduced by Choe Sejin in There are minor differences between the orderings used in North and South Korea.

So now there is no way to make Aabenraa and Aachen sort differently. Which brings me to a question how pre-surname particles are treated in various languages? I would guess without looking up that Russian goes with the most common usage ignoring morphology. Google finds what you want no matter what, and a bit more. I now know that in Bielefeld! The first link to something relating to a person is. I found him immediately. Google caters especially for people who know 0.

I never even had a Dutch boyfriend, which would have explained it. My general rule for surname particles is that a capitalized particle Merete Van Kamp , or one that is written solid with the surname Jerry terHorst , is part of the surname; a lower-case particle Alexis de Tocqueville is not. Note that in French, a lower-case particle is omitted when the first name is omitted, unless the surname is a single syllable: Alexis de Tocqueville is Tocqueville but Charles de Gaulle is de Gaulle.

There is a rogue miscapitaliser occasionally at work in the university systems — the last victim I remember was called Macari or maybe they really were called MacAri! Probably from trying to convert names that are in all caps to mixed case, with special handing of names starting with MAC and MC. I had thought it was always a high-6 single quote precisely because it was a superscript c , and that the apostrophe was an error. Johnson v. Beresford of the Marquess of Waterford Beresfords is the photographer I keep mentioning who took all the pics of Wyndham Lewis and other artists, as well as one of the most famous studio portraits of the young Virginia Woolf.

That citation is marked in green as having been added 3 hours ago as I write by a certain Jnestorius. Merely pointing a finger at ignorance is not playing the Wikipedia game. A couple of days ago, I found something on Wikipedia that used to be common but is now rather rare. It was a short article that was clearly written by someone who did not know anything about the subject matter.

It looked like they were trying to be helpful but had just misunderstood the terminology and written a paragraph about a completely different topic albeit one named after the same person. It took a bit of searching to figure out what he meant. Do I know from Irish already?

Now I sorta understand one small item, but am not emboldened thereby to edit it. Over the last few years, merely while browsing through WiPe articles for other reasons, I have swept up dozens of raisins en passant — typos and ESL-speak.

So I myself am a Korinthenfeger , cleaning up after the -kacker as time permits. Mostly I tend the cows and tilt against the windmills of change.

My point was that anecdotally any change I make is very likely to be reverted by somone who assumes either bad faith or ignorance on my part. So I gave up reading comments and making changes some years ago. Several other details, though, seem gratuitous. I help run an election office. Till recently, there was a standard in the voter registration unit that all such names would be given a space, regardless of whether the voter or the registrar used no space, space, or apostrophe — thus Mc Adams, Mac Adam, O Connor, De La Cruz.

Recently while I was on leave, someone decided that it was best to have voters decide for themselves. This might seem to make sense. However, many registrations come on election day. The e-pollbooks voter list laptops have no string function that allows searches that would compress that space or eliminate the apostrophe to return matches. So election day registration now sends back an extraordinary number of duplicates.

Part of the problem is that a lot of Mcs and Os have no standard themselves, and go back and forth depending on the form. Nevermind some of the de la Madrid Hurtados, who come in as dela Madrid one time, Hurtado the next. I found a maxim on the internet somewhere: Falsehoods Programmers Believe About Names: 39 — people whose names break my system are weird outliers. They should have had solid, acceptable names.

The system should adapt, but till it does, voters need solid, acceptable versions of their names. Identity voter fraud, while by no means common, is not so rare as activists would have you believe, so culling the list of deadwood, duplicates and other bad registrations is important.

And the linked article is itself presumably a reliable secondary source. Swedish used to mix mix the Vs and the Ws together, but now I mostly see ordering where W has its own section after V. Not so convenient today, I guess, with huge library systems who have many acquisitions every week.

Of course trusting Google Scholar metadata is itself blameworthy. I think it was actually some other pair of Chinese characters; I substituted the ones that I thought would fit best in the context. Hmm, I thought it looked like a link when I posted it. I thought I was going to get to the end of the comments on the post about Thai names before anyone said anything about Brazilian and Portuguese names, which are often more problematical than Spanish names. The order Given name s -Paternal surname-Maternal surname is pretty consistently used in Spanish names, but is often ignored in Portuguese names.

I went on a research assessment exercise in Portugal in , and was sent lots of CVs, in which some people had as many as ten names. Official lists of names for example results of student exams on noticeboards in universities sometimes order them alphabetically by given names in Portugal and Brazil. I have encountered that in both countries, and nowhere else. How fortunate that this brilliant idea occurred to them!

And all of Egypt, Iraq, Bahrain, Lebanon is processed in this manner. What a genius they have in the academic affairs! Times story from just prior to the primary. The key point of historical interest in hindsight is that the story badly mispredicted the outcome of the primary, but the point of orthographic interest is that Sen. Not sure if this was a weird glitch or a recognized space-saving technique for headlinese. In Rwanda this is official. Everybody seems to have a very Catholic name in French form as a given name, and everybody has their own surname which is neither heritable nor changeable, is in Kinyarwanda and is chosen in a ceremony by older relatives.

In Melanesia, Christianized people adopted a Bible name as their first name and kept their own names as surnames Margaret Mead talks about it. Several generations later, the original names are now ordinary surnames.

So, for example, Onyango Obama b. This presumably relates to the fact that traditional names were only used in speaking Yimas, not Tok Pisin, and not even always then; moreover, even when Foley described Yimas in many children were growing up speaking Tok Pisin alone.

Oh, aye, the weel-kent Scots political theorist McIavelly. One of the further-flung members of the tribe, along with that pillar of the Cypriot Kirk, Archbishop McArios.

The history of bilingual dictionaries reconsidered : Large bilingual glossaries in alphabetical order must have existed well before AD. These extracts illustrate many of the main characteristics of Ps. The two languages normally match in form as well as in meaning and, when Greek words are ambiguous, articles may be added to make the form of the Latin clear as with duae and duas.