“I think someone who was teaching children, or perhaps foreigners, wanted to keep the sounds of the letters separated,” Watt said. “The Egyptians were very good keepers of records, and no letter order has been found there,” he said. The evidence that the order of the alphabet originated in the area now occupied by Lebanon and Syria, Watt said, includes a clay brick inscribed with letters in alphabetical order that was found there and time-dated to about 1500 BC. “From the Romans, it came down to us,” Watt said. Later in history, the Phoenicians transmitted the alphabet to the Greeks, and it then went to the Etruscan people in Italy, who gave it to the Romans. “Now the curious thing is that when the Semitic tribes borrowed the Egyptian alphabet, they borrowed the idea that the forms (letters) stand for sounds, but they didn’t borrow the sounds.” The letters still have much of the Egyptian form. The letter B was a (symbol of a) little Egyptian house with courtyard. “The letter A was the Egyptians’ highly stylized picture of an ox. the six letters U through Z came later in history. “The matrix used a few letters that are no longer used by us, although the Greek alphabet still has three of those,” Watt said. Watt said the inspiration for his theory came to him about three years ago. Some letters of the alphabet have come and gone, but the letters that are still intact, and that existed in 1500 BC, are in the same order today as they were then.” “Think about it: The order of the alphabet that kids in our schoolrooms recite today is probably the oldest cultural artifact that they’ll ever have direct contact with. And apparently the order of the letters started about that same time, which is astonishing. “The alphabet achieved its present form, A through T, by about 1500 BC. “The alphabet was invented by the Egyptians, and it was borrowed by some Semitic tribe in close contact with Egypt, probably after 2000 BC,” Watt said. “Games were played on squares, such as checkers.”Īlthough Watt’s theory attributes the order of the alphabet to a Semitic tribe in the Near East, the letters are another matter. “Woven floor coverings often were in that design. “No theory is really accepted,” Watt said.Ī matrix, with its squares and columns, was a natural tool for the ancients to use in ordering the alphabet, Watt said. Others have theorized that the alphabet’s order reflected moon and star movements, or parts of the body, or memory devices of ancient civilizations. Watt’s theory is not the only scholarly explanation of alphabetical order ever suggested. Klammer agreed that this was a possibility because “some teachers refer to their class lists in asking questions.” Watt said he believes that alphabetical order has an unseen and unmeasured impact on human lives: “I think a student whose name is like mine, beginning with W, near the end of the alphabet, doesn’t get as much attention in school as someone whose surname starts with an earlier letter of the alphabet.” ![]() “When we talk of students first starting to learn, we sometimes say, ‘They’re learning their ABCs,’ and, of course, we mean they’re learning the beginning of reading and writing,” Klammer said. Learning the order of the alphabet is one of the first steps in a child’s education, Klammer pointed out. ![]() “But, in fact, alphabetical order is a cultural thing-and apparently a very ancient cultural thing.” “I think it’s one of those basics we tend to take as a part of nature, something we think about as seldom as we think of gravity or the sky being blue,” he said. “If we didn’t have that form of order, some other form would have to be invented,” he said. He did note that the matrix theory has a counterpart in India: “The Indian alphabet divides letters into rows and columns.”Īlphabetical order is an extremely important cultural device, said Thomas Klammer, chairman of the English Department at California State University, Fullerton. Gair said he had not yet read Watt’s article. Gair is the author of the Collier’s Encyclopedia explanation of the alphabet, its history and its evolution. “If he (Watt) can make this stick, it’s a very important scholarly discovery.” Gair, a linguistics professor at Cornell University in Ithaca, N.Y. Reading those columns from left to right produces a recitation of the alphabet.Īlthough too new to have been widely analyzed, the theory is already causing excitement in the academic community. Under Watt’s theory, a matrix was used to arrange the letters in columns.
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