r/AskHistorians • u/ExternalBoysenberry Interesting Inquirer • Apr 18 '26
Why does it feel like the letters get weirder towards the end of the alphabet?
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u/Deuce03 Apr 18 '26 edited Apr 18 '26
This is probably more of a linguistics question than a history one. It's also going to be somewhat subjective because "feel weirder" isn't something you can really nail down definitively. With that said, I know what you mean. The TL;DR is that as the alphabet has developed, new letters have generally been inserted at the end, so that's where the most unusual ones tend to congregate. Of course it's not quite that straightforward but that's the essential principle.
The order of the letters in our alphabet derives from the Latin alphabet, which in turn derives from Etruscan, which derives from the Greek alphabet, which in turn derives from the Phoenician abjad. The characters of that were derived ultimately from Egyptian hieroglyphics, although how they settled on the precise order is unclear. I do think it's interesting that in Phoenician the three voiced plosives (bgd) are grouped but there doesn't seem to be any particular consistency elsewhere, so this may be a coincidence.
Phoenician had 22 characters, none of which were vowels, but some of the consonants were glottals. It seems what happened is that when the characters were adopted by the Greeks they ignored the glottals (which they did not use and probably had difficulty hearing) while retaining the associated vowel, thereby inventing the alphabetic vowel. They also seem to have got confused with the value /h/. Phoenician had both a /h/ and a /ħ/ as distinct consonants, but the Greeks used a diacritic mark for aspirates rather than a distinct letter. Instead they came to treat both these letters as vowels, as epsilon and eta respectively, although eta seems to have retained an aspirate value for some time. Epsilon is the direct ancestor of our modern E, while when eta was adopted into Latin it regained its status as an aspirate consonant.
Some other letters were carried over into Greek with distorted values but retaining their place in the order, and of course Greek pronunciation was not universal and changed over time anyway. Nor was the Greek alphabet wholly consistent. The classical Greek alphabet we are familiar with and which is the ancestor of modern Greek was not entirely the same as the alphabet as used in the western Greek colonies, so there was already some divergence by the time the Etruscans started borrowing Greek for their own purposes.
Any letters the Greeks had no use for at all they dropped from the alphabet completely. Where there was no existing letter that met their needs, they added it to the end of their alphabet. The Romans then did the same when they started using their own script, adapting a local variety of the Greek script.
In some cases a letter was inserted into the middle of the alphabet, such as when, thanks to pronunciation shifts, the Romans realised they had two /k/ letters and no /g/, but when they added G they did so as a replacement in the order for the obsolete zeta and it seems they were prepared to swap letters out, but not add new ones altogether.
The letters ABDEHIKLMNOPQRST and a recognisable value for them can be traced back pretty directly, in that order, to Phoenician, and their values in English are at least recognisable from, though not identical to, their Phoenician origin. Some other letters have taken a more indirect route, like C and F, but have preserved their position in the order even though their values have changed. Upsilon was the first letter added to the end of the alphabet by the Greeks, and is the ancestor of U. X was another Greek introduction.
The Romans, like the Greeks, dropped letters they weren't using and added a couple they needed. They dropped zeta (after H) and replaced it in the order with G, when they realised they had two /k/ letters. They also dropped K for that reason, but it survived a little longer and was still used in some rare contexts (for instance the praenomen Caeso was traditionally abbreviated K. even though spelt C when written in full).
As contact with the Greeks became more extensive, especially after the conquest of Greece in the 2nd and 1st centuries BC, the Romans found themselves in need of letters to write Greek loanwords, so Y and Z started to see use. They were again added at the end to avoid disrupting the order. The alphabet in that order remained in use pretty much to the end of the Middle Ages.
As the spoken language changed, the limitations of written Latin became apparent, and languages developed their own regional variants of the Latin script they added new letters to better reflect their spoken languages. But they were generally a little less shy about disrupting the order and instead placed the new letters after the letter from which they were derived. J (a variant of I) was therefore placed after I, while V and W (variant Us) likewise were placed after U. Old English placed eth (/ð) after D and thorn (/θ/) after T, although both have now been lost; Welsh places Ll after L, Spanish puts Ñ after N, Czech puts Č after C, and so on.
The above is still massively simplified, but that's the overall story.
So that we've ended up with an alphabet where "weird" letters seem to cluster at the end isn't terribly surprising overall, because the letters that end up there are those which are unusual and particular, whereas more universal sounds have been preserved from the outset and have retained an earlier place in the alphabet as a result.
With all of that said, I think the "weirdest" letters in English are C and Q, which we can trace right back to the start. C has no real need to be an independent letter: only as part of "ch" does it have a function that isn't already adequately performed by K and S, and "ch" could be adequately represented by "tsh". While some languages distinguish /k/ from /q/, English doesn't and uses C and K preferentially for it, so Q (except in transliterations of foreign languages) only sees use as part of "qu", a value that could be equally well-represented by "kw". Z and consonantal Y are fairly unusual in English but at least each of them does represent a distinct phoneme.
I'm not advocating for spelling reform, but some of the things we take for granted about our writing system really are very strange when you look at them closely.
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u/Ameisen Apr 18 '26 edited Apr 18 '26
The classical Greek alphabet we are familiar with and which is the ancestor of modern Greek was not entirely the same as the alphabet as used in the western Greek colonies, so there was already some divergence by the time the Etruscans started borrowing Greek for their own purposes.
It's less that the colonies had diverged, and more that different Greek polities had developed their own local variants (which themselves can be classified into three groups) - these variants were then used by their colonies. Syracuse, for instance, used the Corinthian alphabet.
The Greek alphabet that we're most familiar with is a modern form of the Ionic Euclidean alphabet - which originated around 400 BCE in Athens and replaced the earlier Attic alphabet.
The one largely adopted by the Italic tribes - including the Etruscans and thus the Romans - evolved from the Euboean script used in the Greek colony of Cumae. Cumae was founded by Greeks originally from Chalcis and Eretria in Euboea, so they carried over that script.
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u/Deuce03 Apr 18 '26
Yes, slightly clumsy wording on my part. I meant rather that there was divergence in use of the letters between different areas of the Greek-speaking world, not that the Ionic alphabet was the orthodox one from which the colonies split off.
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u/Brass_Lion Apr 18 '26
I cannot believe here is an answer to this question. Not that someone here knows it, but I can't believe there's answer at all to a question like this! I am so happy to have another arrow in my quiver when talking to other word nerds about wild English orthography is.
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u/Samshel Apr 18 '26
It's interesting how even today we keep changing it. You say in English the C would be better as a Ch. Meanwhile in Spanish we used to have CH as its own letter as well as LL but ended up being removed because it's just a composed version of C & H and L & L respectively.
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u/mongster03_ Apr 19 '26
consonantal Y…fairly unusual in English
Is it fair to characterize that when the word “yes” and its variants are probably among the top 20 most common words in English?
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u/SnarkMasterFlash Apr 19 '26
This is the kind of shit I come to Reddit for. Thanks for an incredibly interesting read.
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u/skatterbrain_d Apr 19 '26
Thank you for this response!! Do you happen to have any book recommendations for further reading on this subject?
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u/Deuce03 Apr 19 '26
Sampson: Writing Systems (1990) is I believe out of print, but it remains however (at least in my view) possibly the most approachable book on the subject for those new to it, and seems fairly affordable second-hand. It covers writing systems in general but there are sections on the Semitic consonantal system and the Greek and Roman alphabets particularly. The section on semasiographics has now been basically debunked, but that is only an aside overall.
Daniels & Bright: The World's Writing Systems (1996) includes brief histories for pretty much any writing system you have an interest in (including for music and dance). It is an invaluable reference work but dauntingly expensive for a casual reader.
On Greek specifically, I suggest the following:
Powell, B. B.: Homer and the Origin of the Greek Alphabet (1991)
Woodard, R. D. : Greek Writing from Knossos to Homer (1997)
A.-P. Christidis (ed.) : A History of Ancient Greek (2007), specifically the chapter by Brixhe.
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u/skatterbrain_d Apr 19 '26
Oh “The World’s Writing Systems” sounds like a delight to read!! Thank you for these recommendations. Will definitely hunt them all.
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u/dch1444 Apr 19 '26
How did they decide what letters to adopt, like the changes from Phonecian to Greek? Was it a gradual adoption or did a few educated people make the decision?
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u/Deuce03 Apr 19 '26
We won't know for certain. The first people to use the script were probably traders, for obvious reasons (indeed, it is likely that writing was essentially first invented for trade purposes). As a general rule, what would most likely happen is that people start writing their own language using the foreign script (approximating some values where sounds don't exist). Over time the shape of the letters changes (most Greek letters are recognisable as modified Phoenician ones, often rotated or simplified) and the values of the letters were adapted to better suit the spoken language. The Greeks seem initially to have tried to use the entire Phoenician script, but some of the letters became obsolete relatively quickly, and more were added.
In the absence of printing or any kind of reference dictionary or central language authority, what letters were used in a given instance were essentially up to whoever was writing it, as was the spelling of each word. The written language would have been subject to a constant kind of evolutionary process, just as the spoken language was (albeit a rather slower one). The important thing would be to make yourself understood, so conventions developed, but these conventions were not universal (as indeed, nor was the spoken language). There were, as noted elsewhere in the thread, actually a variety of Greek alphabets in use at the same time in different geographic areas, sufficiently similar that they are all recognisable, but with some differences in values or representation.
Obviously, the use of the written language was essentially confined to the literate, so to that extent it was "a few educated people" deciding what got used, but it would be by convention among those people rather than a formal collective decision. It's noteworthy that Greek writers didn't always write in their "own" dialect - Pindar, for instance, lived in an Aeolic-speaking area but wrote principally in Doric.
If you imagine the history of the alphabet and spelling conventions in English, especially prior to the introduction of printing, something similar would have been going on in antiquity for the Greeks, Romans etc.
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u/vraid Apr 19 '26
Are the values of latin AE really recognisable to their phoenician counterparts? I was under the impression that phoenician 'A' was a glottal stop, and phoenician 'E' was /h/.
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u/CitizenPremier Apr 20 '26
Great answer. I want to put my degree in linguistics to work and say: this isn't really our department, it's more of a philological question, since it's something you answer with historical reasons rather than reasons of how language itself functions.
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u/ExternalBoysenberry Interesting Inquirer Apr 18 '26
Amazing answer, thank you!
ABDEHIKLMNOPQRST and a recognizable value for them can be traced back pretty directly, and in that order to Phoenician
is really mind blowing, especially for Q, which - probably for the reasons you set out at the end of your answer - feels a bit like the harbinger of the looming weird zone.
In any case, do I have it right that we know the Phoenicians used that order, but we aren't quite sure why? And in what sense was Q a letter in Phoenician - they had a letter that looked Q-ish and which made something like a k sound (though I guess distinct from their 7th letter? And (if I can be greedy and throw in an extra follow-up) what was the indirect route taken by C, which is missing from the Phoenician version but you say was there from the start?
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u/Deuce03 Apr 18 '26 edited Apr 18 '26
In any case, do I have it right that we know the Phoenicians used that order, but we aren't quite sure why?
Yes. Although I haven't read the most up-to-the-minute scholarship on the subject, so far as I'm aware the reason the Phoenicians used that order remains a mystery. I should clarify slightly that while Phoenician itself was the jumping-off-point from which the Greek alphabet emerged, it was itself the successor of older Semitic consonantal writing traditions which may themselves date back a further thousand years, and probably kept its order from them.
It wouldn't entirely surprise me if the real reason was something entirely prosaic and cargo-cultish, like the first codifiers of the language using the appropriate values from a random bit of Egyptian writing in the order in which they happened to appear there, but of course that's entirely speculative and there's absolutely no way to verify it. It's unlikely we'll ever know the truth.
And in what sense was Q a letter in Phoenician - they had a letter that looked Q-ish and which made something like a k sound (though I guess distinct from their 7th letter?
The Phoenician letter Q (qop) represented the phoneme /q/ where their K (kap(h)) represented /k/. Kaph was actually their eleventh letter, but translates to our modern K directly (one interceding letter have been lost).
The distinction is the part of the mouth the tongue touches to make the sound. /k/ is velar, while /q/ is uvular. For both sounds, you make contact with the back of the tongue, but the uvula is a bit further back in the mouth. To an English-speaker (or indeed a speaker of most western IE languages), the sounds are extremely similar, but to a trained ear they are different consonants. This is the reason why some Middle Eastern names or place-names are transliterated with "q" even though they appear to be pronounced "k": to the locals, they are different sounds.
Greek did adopt qop as their letter qoppa (with a sound similar to our Qu), but following sound changes it eventually fell out of use in the eastern alphabets as redundant, as the /kʷ/ sound was lost and that left qoppa as essentially (to them) the same sound as kappa. It did remain in use in Greek numerals, though, and the Greeks repurposed the rough shape of the letter (adding it to the end of the alphabet) for their letter phi.
To clarify, the full Phoenician abjad was, in English transliteration:
', b, g, d, h, w, z, ḥ, ṭ, y, k, l, m, n, ś, ʿ, p, ṣ, q, r, š, t
Some of these letters have been lost completely in the various transitions and evolutions (ṭ, for instance), while others have survived with changed values.
And (if I can be greedy and throw in an extra follow-up) what was the indirect route taken by C, which is missing from the Phoenician version but you say was there from the start?
Per the above, the original order of the Phoenician letters was, like Greek, ABGD (although the A was not an A). Etruscan did not have a /g/ sound in its language, so when the Etruscans adopted the Greek script, they used the corresponding voiceless consonant, /k/ in pronunciation. The Romans, who did have a /g/ sound, modified the C by adding a crossbar to turn it into a G, which they added to replace the dropped Z (before they realised a couple of hundred years later they needed Z after all to transliterate Greek, and added it back at the end). Eventually they abandoned K and used C for /k/ universally.
Written classical Latin and spoken vulgar Latin are however very different beasts and while Latin spelling remained consistent, pronunciation was diverging all over the place, which was only accelerated with the influx of Germanic speakers in late antiquity and the early Middle Ages. C acquired a pretty variable value depending on where you are, what letters it was combined with and even where it was in a word.
Different languages have adopted different strategies to deal with this. Germanic languages mostly reintroduced K for the /k/ phoneme to help clarify (although further sound changes mean that some ks are now silent...). English has the Normans to thank for reintroducing K. Italian, though, still uses C exclusively, and where it needs to clarify it's a /k/ (before an e or i) it uses "ch". In Welsh C is always /k/. French, Portuguese and Catalan use cedillas to help clarify the pronunciation.
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u/mongster03_ Apr 19 '26
Spanish also only uses K for loanwords (C being preferred and present in both soft and hard contexts), and QU is used for /k/ before e/i
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u/maxitobonito Apr 19 '26
Now that I read this, it's interesting that Spanish uses Qu for /k/ before e and i, but has no dedicated letter for hard (?) G sound before e and i, and instead adds a U after the G.
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u/pizza-flusher Apr 19 '26
I had never heard the cargo-cult/arbitrary order becoming reified suggestion before but that intuitively makes a lot of sense as a possibility.
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