John Cowan wrote:
>
> Does anyone have a clue about the roots of alphabetic order? It seems
> remarkably stable for something that seems so arbitrary.
No.
The best guess is that the symbols are listed in the order they happened
to be thought up. There are some associative groupings of names (e.g.
body parts) that would be of interest if we could be sure that the names
known from Hebrew etc. really are the names they were first known by.
Long discussion in Driver's *Semitic Writing* (3d ed. 1976), but his
explanations are too convoluted to be convincing.
--
Peter T. Daniels
grammatim@...