UC Linguist Reaches Into History With Theory of Alphabetical Order

A UC Irvine professor believes that he has solved one of the Western world’s oldest cultural mysteries: the origin of alphabetical order.

From cradle to grave, UCI linguist and social sciences professor William C. Watt points out, alphabetical order decides places in lines, seats in school classes, the order of charts and directories.

“It affects one’s life tremendously,” he said.

Yet no one has ever been able to explain how and why the letters are arranged as they are.

Now, Watt believes that he has unscrambled that 3,500-year-old puzzle. In an article in the latest issue of the Journal of Near Eastern Studies, the 55-year-old Santa Monica resident offers an intriguing theory of how alphabetical order started--and how it stayed essentially in the same form from one civilization to another from 1500 B.C. to today.

Watt’s theory is that alphabetical order was first constructed about 1500 BC by some unknown Semitic scribe or teacher living in the area that is now Lebanon and Syria. The letters, under Watt’s theory, were arranged according to their sounds and where the sounds are made in the mouth. Like-sounding letters were separated so that children learning the alphabet would not be confused by similar sounds.

Under Watt’s theory, a matrix was used to arrange the letters in columns. Reading those columns from left to right produces a recitation of the alphabet.

Though too new to have been widely analyzed, the theory is already causing excitement in the academic community.

“Good Lord,” said James W. Gair, a linguistics professor at Cornell University in Ithaca, N.Y. “If he (Watt) can make this stick, it’s a very important scholarly discovery.”

Gair is the author of the Collier’s Encyclopedia explanation of the alphabet, its history and its evolution. Gair said he had not yet read Watt’s article.

He did note that the matrix theory has a counterpart in India: “The Indian alphabet divides letters into rows and columns.”

Alphabetical order is an extremely important cultural device, noted Thomas Klammer, chairman of the English department at Cal State Fullerton. “If we didn’t have that form of order, some other form would have to be invented,” he said.

“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. “But, in fact, alphabetical order is a cultural thing--and apparently a very ancient cultural thing.”

Learning the order of the alphabet is one of the first steps in a child’s education, Klammer pointed out: “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.”

Watt said he believes that alphabetical order has 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.”

Not Only Explanation

Klammer agreed that this was a possibility because “some teachers refer to their class lists in asking questions.”

Watt’s theory is not the only scholarly explanation of alphabetical order ever suggested. Others have theorized that the alphabet’s order reflected moon and star movements, or parts of the body, or memory devices of ancient civilizations. “No theory is really accepted,” Watt said.

A matrix, with its squares and columns, was a natural tool for the ancients to use in ordering the alphabet, Watt said.

“It was part of their living,” he said. “Woven floor coverings often were in that design.”

“Games were played on squares, such as checkers.”

While Watt’s theory attributes the order of the alphabet to a Semitic tribe in the Near East, the letters are another matter.

“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.

“The alphabet achieved its present form, A through T, by about 1500 BC. And apparently the order of the letters started about that same time, which is astonishing. . . .

“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. . . . 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.”

Watt said the inspiration for his theory came to him about three years ago.

Few Letters No Longer Used

“The matrix used a few letters that are no longer used by us, although the Greek alphabet still has three of those,” Watt said. “The basic matrix was A through T . . . the six letters U through Z came later in history.

“The letter A was the Egyptians’ highly stylized picture of an ox. The letter B was a (symbol of a) little Egyptian house with courtyard. . . . The letters still have much of the Egyptian form.

“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.”

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. “From the Romans, it came down to us,” Watt said.

Good Record Keepers

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.

“The Egyptians were very good keepers of records, and no letter order has been found there,” he said.

“I think someone who was teaching children, or perhaps foreigners, wanted to keep the sounds of the letters separated,” Watt said. “Grouping similarly made sounds together into columns might have eased the learner’s task, and if they were required to recite the letter order, as today’s first-graders do, keeping some distance between very similar sounds would help prevent their being confused. . . .

“It’s like a musical scale, but from the bottom of the octave to the top of the octave.”

The identity of the person who created the order of the alphabet probably will never be known, Watt said, but he believes that “he or she was a great thinker--a da Vinci of that era.”

The best proof of the accuracy of his theory, Watt said, obviously would be a copy of the matrix itself, on a clay tablet of the time. But none has been unearthed so far.

“It would be nice if a clay table does turn up, with the matrix neatly inscribed on it,” Watt said. “And maybe one will, someday.

“Till then, the matrix must be described as a hypothesis. But it is a hypothesis that fits the facts as we know them extremely well. And, unlike the theories that have preceded it, it makes no appeal to astrology, mysterious messages or improvised notions of pictorial similarity.”