Ah, alphabet.  Basically the backbone of books.  Certainly complex in its creation, contorted over centuries.  (Dictionary didacts have doubtless deduced my design for this diatribe.)

Every English (etc.) elementary educator exudes each explanation essentially equally.  From our forebearers to the future, the form and function hold firm.  Guided, we get a given gallimaufry of glyphs grabbed from Greek.  Happily, we hum a harmony which helps us hold these hyper-modern hieroglyphs in our heads.

Is its index inevitable?  Journey to Jordan and Jeruslaem and their abjads jumble the jots only just.  Levantine lexicographical lists of long ago led (laterally) to Latin’s layout, a line of letters largely like from Lisbon to London to Lublin.  Maritime mercantilists meandering from many metropoles made this mix of marks mandatory in modern markets.  Now, nobody needs to know another.

Our order’s of old oriental origin.  Proto-Semitic pictograms progressed to Phoenician poetry and prose, perhaps picking this progression purposefully or perhaps probabilistically.  Quite a question.

Rome received its written arrangement from a restricted region of its original realm.  Southern Semitic scripts supported a second sequence for the same set of symbols.  Those typographies took an alternate track towards today.  (Ugaritic, unusually, unified usage.)  Various vocabularies preserved their order, even as their verbiage varied.  What weird ways, then, would our words have wandered with these wild ABCs in our writing?  Xenophilic experts can explain.  You see, Yemen used it years ago.  Zealots utilizing Ge’ez as well.

(Brief explanation in case that wasn’t entirely understandable: our modern alphabetical order derives from the Northern semitic alphabetical order.  A second southern branch of the same language family uses a different alphabetical order, which has survived in some modern languages.  The question is, what would our alphabet look like had it taken the southern order instead.)

Ethiopian epistles can elucidate this enquiry.  Letters there aren’t literally like our letters, but they’re historically linked.  Hard “Ḥäwt” (ሐ) historically hews to “H”, hushed “Hoy” (ሀ) holds to E however.  Making the matches is manageable.  Quite quick.  First off, find the forebearers of our final forms.  Second, switch the symbols to the southern script’s sequence.  Rather remarkable, right?

This isn’t totally undisputed truth.  Knowledge is knotty in this kind of knitting.  No matter; it’s nice to knock our noggins nevertheless.  But basically we’re betting.

Perhaps posterity will persist in propagating the predominant printed procession.  Amharic’s active affect acts against alphabetical adjustment.  On the other hand, orthographers could still overlook older orders.  Computers could certainly cause a change, as cross-linguistic conversations continue.  Do dominant dictionaries doubtlessly displace dying dialects?  Ge’ez’s glyphs were guarded for generations.  Its imminent imperilment is improbable – it isn’t inconceivable.

Justifiably, we’d jump for joy if juniors always learned their progenitors’ jots.  Unfortunately, such usage is unusual for uncommon language users.  Vocabularies vanish.  We watch them wither.  X’d from existence.  Youth’s “yesterday”.  Zeroed.

Amharic, the largest language using the Ge’ez script and its alternative alphabetical order, is spoken by tens of millions of people still and is the Lingua Franca of Ethiopia.  It’s not an endangered language – at least not at the moment.  But most of the world’s languages aren’t so lucky.  So next time you work your way through the alphabet, maybe take a moment to think about the alphabetical order we could have had, and the many endangered languages that – for now – we still have.

Coming soon: We briefly had long Connecticut