Alphabetical order! Also, numbers

[aldersprig]

Repeated from twitter: Arguments against having the 7 basic numbers rhyme with each other? I.e. bahp dahp gahp kahp...


Which brings me to - does anyone know how alphabetical order in other alphabets is determined?

Comments

[clare_dragonfly]

Argument: it might be hard to hear the difference, especially with very similar sounds--like, in your example, gahp and kahp, because g and k are the same, except that one is voiced and the other unvoiced. It could be inconvenient to hear three when they said four and vice versa.

As for alphabetical order, I don't know, but in natural languages, it's probably more linguistic evolution than anything else.

[inventrix]

Like Clare said, it's difficult to differentiate if they rhyme. Base numbers are usually very different-sounding from each other.

Some examples:
one two three four five six seven eight nine ten
uno dos tres cuatro cinco seis siete ocho nueve diez
ichi ni san shi(or yon) go roku shichi(or nana) hachi kyuu juu

The only ones that really sound a bit similar to other numbers are in Japanese and are the two that have separate, entirely dissimilar variants.

As for alphabetical order, one of the early Indo-European languages settled on what I believe to be a fairly arbitrary order and we've all just been copying it ever since. The existence of an alphabetical order really only happened once literacy first became fairly common in a language group's culture, I think.