Alphabetical order

“ The reason is not strong enough to justify interfering with the alphabetical order, which demands that amateur shall precede and. It is needless to compel the searcher to stop and think whether the word “art” in the phrase he is hunting for is a noun {117} or an adjective; indeed, it is not only a useless refinement, but positively dangerous, as likely occasionally to lead him to overlook an entry which is out of its alphabetical order. ”

“ Mead's and Mr. Folkes's, the books were not arranged according to any particular classification. Old black-letter English were mixed with modern Italian, French, and Latin; and novels and romances interspersed with theology and mathematics. An alphabetical arrangement, be the books of whatever kind they may, will in general obviate the inconvenience felt from such an undigested plan; and it were "devoutly to be wished," by all true bibliographers, that an act of parliament should pass for the due observance of this alphabetical order. We all know our A, B, C, but have not all analytical heads ”

“ The combinations of these characters, intended to express all the radical words in any language, are to be arranged in numerical order, from unity to 10,000, which number he thinks sufficient to express all words in general use; and to each number is to be annexed the word in any language, as for example English, of which it is a symbol, thus forming a numerical vocabulary. The same words are also to be arranged in another vocabulary in the alphabetical order of the language they belong to; thus each serves for a key to the other. ”

“ The fourth is one of those little cuts that are sometimes used in missals in the place of pictorial initials, and which, according to Dibdin, are to be classed with initials.
It is not often that we meet with complete alphabets from single books, except in the case of works arranged by alphabetical order and dictionaries. Such is the case with the Catholicon, of which J. Wolff published an edition in 1503. Unfortunately the alphabet is not uniform, either in size, style, or subject, and some of the letters are of minor interest. We have selected the most curious and most uncommon. ”

“ Notes and Queries, 5th S., xii. 511.
There is one project of the Index Society which has never been undertaken, but which is still wanted as much as ever—viz. a general or universal index. Some think this to be an impossibility, and that to attempt its preparation is a waste of time. Those who hold this opinion have not sufficient faith in the simplicity and usefulness of the alphabet. [pg 215] Every one has notes and references of some kind, which are useless if kept unarranged, but, if sorted into alphabetical order, become valuable. ”

“ Several such collections exist formed far back in Old English times, the composite character of which, partly glossary, partly vocabulary, reveals itself upon even a cursory examination.
As these manuscript lists came to be copied and re-copied, it was seen that their usefulness would be increased by putting the words and phrases into alphabetical order, whereby a particular word could be more readily found than by looking for it in a promiscuous list of some hundreds or thousands of words. The first step was to bring together all the words having the same first letter. ”

“ We want as little classification as possible in an alphabetical index. Mr. W. F. Poole wisely said in reference to the proposal of one of his helpers on the Index of Periodical Literature to place Wealth, Finance, and Population under the heading of Political Economy: "The fatal defect of every classified arrangement is that nobody understands it except the person who made it and he is often in doubt."
3. The entries to be arranged according to the order of the English alphabet. ”

“ A method of securing uniformity in such indexes may, hereafter, be agreed upon, so that they may be combined and form an alphabetical index of subjects to the general catalogue. It is thought best, however, for the present, to limit our efforts to the procuring of good alphabetical catalogues, as a groundwork, to which other valuable aids to research, may, as opportunities offer, be superadded. ”

“ As a whole, the new alphabet was so systematized that the sound of any letter, vowel or consonant was always the same, wherever it occurred, or whatever its alphabetical collocation. Nor did the new alphabet contain any silent letters, or fail to provide a letter for every distinct sound in the language. The difference between short and long vowels was compassed by a single vowel where short, and a double one, where long. ”

“ The passage, too, in Plato, on which the argument is made to depend, may just as well refer to the running-hand or abridged hieroglyphical signs, as to alphabetical writing; and the supposition, that the priests gave an alphabetical character to this kind of abridged pictorial writing after the discovery of the real alphabet, (and alphabetical Ackerblad and Dr. Young have proved it to be,) is quite hypothetic. We think it more probable that alphabetical writing is much older than the hieroglyphics ”

“ Such is the general view of the additions, ejections, changes of power, and changes of order in the English alphabet. The extent, however, to which an alphabet is faulty, is no measure of the extent to which an orthography is faulty; since an insufficient alphabet may, by consistency in its application, be more useful than a full and perfect alphabet unsteadily applied.
§ 174. One of our orthographical expedients, viz., the reduplication of the consonant following, to express the shortness (dependence) of the preceding vowel, is as old as the classical languages: terra, θάλασσα. ”

“ The honesty of these writers is unimpeachable, however much their competency may be questioned; and no slight confirmation of their testimony appears, in the judgment of many modern scholars, to be furnished by the correspondence in number, name (the sibilants s and z excepted) , and order, although not in form, between the letters of the Greek and the Semitic alphabets. "In default of further evidence, the very word Alphabet," Canon Taylor remarks, "might suffice to disclose the secret of its origin. ”

“ One single letter gave it to me.”
“How was that?”
“If you will look at the telegram,” said Ben, spreading it out before me, “you will notice that in one instance only is a single letter seen standing by itself. That is the letter ‘b,’ which I concluded must stand for the article ‘a,’ for I know of no other, unless it is ‘I.’ Now, the letter ‘b’ is the second one in the alphabet, and stands next in order to ‘a.’ If this system is followed throughout the cipher, we have only to take, instead of the letters as written, the next in order as they occur in the alphabet. ”

“ The introduction of new types, although it made possible the use of a scientifically perfect alphabet, proved to be an insurmountable obstacle to the general adoption of phonetic printing, and after experiments with new types extending over forty years Pitman adopted, in 1883, with some additions, the rules recommended by the American Spelling Reform Association and the American Philological Society in order to secure the phonetic representation of the language without the addition of new letters to the alphabet. ”

“ There are few things more irritating [pg 136] than to find the alphabet confused by the union of the vowel i with the consonant j, or the vowel u with the consonant v. No doubt they were not distinguished some centuries ago, but this is no reason why they should again be confused now that they are usually distinct. There may be special reasons why they should be mixed together in the British Museum Catalogue, but it is not evident that these are sufficient.
The only safe rule is to use the English alphabet as it is to-day in an English index. ”

“ Truly has it been said that “The history of our alphabet is the golden thread which entwines itself with the long story of man’s civilization;” that “It is the greatest triumph of the human mind;” and again, as “The most wonderful of intellectual achievements.” For we are coming to know that letters are an invention, not spontaneous productions or miracles of language, and that evolution, as in other directions of human inquiry, has much to say upon their origin and history. ”

“ They have bestowed on us an alphabet as practically effective, and as suited to the capabilities of human vision, as any that could have been devised. This alphabet of ours is like an Englishman's dress—plain and manageable; not very artistically arranged, it may be, nor remarkable for copiousness or flow of outline, but sufficiently elastic and capable of extension. ”

“ The mode of arrangement calls for special attention; this may be either chronological, alphabetical or according to classes, but great confusion will be caused by uniting the three systems. The alphabetical arrangement is so simple, convenient and easily understood that it has naturally superseded the other forms, save in some exceptional cases. ”

“ One thing strikes me at once, and that is that in this paragraph all the letters of the alphabet are not used. That is very strange. If we take up a book and open it by chance it will be very seldom that we shall hit upon two hundred and seventy-six letters without all the signs of the alphabet figuring among them. ”

“ By this method the most extensive register is gripped and needs no other index than its own essential structure. If the sheets or cards are kept in their proper sequence, and it would require to be the duty of some one—not necessarily an expert—to see that the alphabetic syllables were kept in serial order, there should be no difficulty in finding the document sought for, if it is there at all. ”

“ That is to suit the Alphabet to the Utterances of the Language.’ He announces that ‘care is taken to give every character one power of its own, in which no other character is allowed to interfere.’ He pointed out the defects and inconsistencies of our ordinary orthography, and sought by means of a simpler alphabet and a new vowel scale to place the spelling of the language on a strictly phonetic basis. ”

“ That was the birth of the Alphabet, one of the greatest and most momentous triumphs of the human mind. The earliest phonograms represented syllables, not individual letters, the distinguishing signs for vowels and consonants being of yet later introduction; in fact, some alphabets, notably the Hebrew and other Semitic, have no true vowels, but only distinguishing marks, diacritical points as they are called, to denote them. To recapitulate, we have 1, picture-writing; 2, ideograms ”

“ Every one who writes a letter, owes his alphabet to the Romans and Greeks; the Greeks owed their alphabet to the Phoenicians, and the Phoenicians learnt it in Egypt. It may be a very imperfect alphabet as all the students of phonetics will tell you ”

“ It may be regarded as established, for instance, that the alphabetical arrangement of entries in a catalogue is the best that can be adopted; and no less so that the alphabetical catalogue gains enormously in value by the addition of a good index of subjects. If, however, advancing a step further, we inquire into the best form of subject-index, we find ourselves involved in controversy, which may continue long, inasmuch as so extensive and heterogeneous a subject is not capable of reduction to precise rules. ”

“ In fact the collocation of capital letters and other logograms, without space, is a beautiful feature of the art. We will explain:
"All the consonants of the English alphabet, when written as CAPITALS, are logograms or word-signs that require no space before or after. Four letters, G, J, Q, X, (being of less frequent use) , are also used for affixes besides being word-signs. The capital letter B invariably stands for be, by, but; C stands for say, sea, see. It can never mean anything else. D is used to express day, die, do; F is the word-sign for of, if. off; G stands for God, go, age. ”

“ Please to understand, then, ignorant Reader, that this curious alphabet reduces all the complex machinery of Cadmus and the rest of the writing-masters to characters as simple as can be made by a dot, a space, and a line, variously combined. Thus, the marks .— designate the letter A. The marks —... designate the letter B. All the other letters are designated in as simple a manner.
Now I am stripping myself of one of the private comforts of my life, (but what will one not do for mankind?) when I explain that this simple alphabet need not be confined to electrical signals. ”

“ By remembering this fact, you will avoid the mistake of thinking because our alphabet, written or printed, is so good, that it could not be better. There is great room for improvement in both departments; in the printed form, the difference between n and u, for instance, is none too great; while in writing hardly one person in ten thousand distinguishes them from each other,—which letter is meant must be guessed by the reader. But the men and women who set up type and correct proofs are much bothered by these defects in our alphabet. ”

“ Putting together, however, what is no longer conjectural, it would seem that the Phœnician alphabet was a compound from various sources, the selection and modification of the several characters being ruled by convenience, and that, primarily and essentially, commercial. Like all business people immersed in many transactions, their method was brevity, and so they aimed as near "shorthand" as they could. ”