* John Cowan
|
| Does anyone have a clue about the roots of alphabetic order? It
| seems remarkably stable for something that seems so arbitrary.

I would guess that the order, like the character names, is ancestral
and dates back to Northern Linear. As far as I know neither are
recorded for Northern Linear, but there is some evidence to support
the theory.

M. O'Connor's section 68 in Daniels&Bright calls this order the
Levantine order and seems to say that it is attested for Phoenician.
He also writes that this order is attested for Ugaritic, an immediate
descendant of NL (together with one similar to the current Arabic
order). To me this seems to indicate that the order originated with
Northern Linear, though that of course is conjecture.

As for why it has been passed on like this down through the millennia,
even surviving script changes, I don't really know. Many people seem
to have difficulty distinguishing between the alphabet and the
alphabet order, perhaps because the order is used as a teaching
device.

--
Lars Marius Garshol, Ontopian <URL: http://www.ontopia.net >
ISO SC34/WG3, OASIS GeoLang TC <URL: http://www.garshol.priv.no >