I was reading Greek mythology last night and came across the story of how the Alphabet was created in Greece (or, rather, brought by the Gods and added to by man). Then, in the supplementary notes that follow, the editor compared the process by which language developed to that of the Celts of Ireland, and suggested that they underwent similar instances of development - even to the point that at one time their languages consisted of the same basic sounds and in the same basic order. Whilst poppycock, I did pontificate some over the development of the alphabet itself.

The Hebrew and Greek alphabets are incredibly similar in what the call their letters. Regards:

Hebrew: Aleph, Beth, Gimel, Dalet...

Greek: Alpha, Beta, Gamma, Delta...

Alright, so if you look into the letters afterwards some of them get a little bit farfetched, but that's irrelevant to this particular study. What I wish to draw upon is the fact that, even though the symbol α is called 'alpha', it is pronounced 'ah'. The reasoning behind this disparity (according to Jared Diamond, anyway) is twofold: if the Greek alphabet is descended from the Hebrew alphabet by way of Phoenician then it follows a similar pattern in what it calls its letters. Second, in order to present the letters in a memorable order, the sounds were given words with which to associate them (aleph means 'ox', for example) - Greek would have simply kept this word order.

You may well be wondering what this has to do with the price of fish, mind, and you'd be perfectly justified in doing so. Think of our own alphabet - better yet, say it to yourself, (quietly, mind, lest you attract undue attention at work or in a computer cluster). What do you notice? What you ought to have noticed is that the sound one associates with the letter is not (or rarely) how we pronounce the letter itself. Now think of the baby alphabet you will have learnt in primary school - pronouncing the letters as they are actually said. To me, this seems much more logical.

Allow me to expand further: take the letter W ("Dubbul-you"). Can you imagine how cumbersome words would be if you have to pronounce every single W in every word as 'dubbulyou'? Wikipedia would be dubbulyoueyekayeyepeeeedeyeeeah, whilst 'whilst' would be dubbulyouhaycheyeelesstee. (And yet www. is dubbulyoudubbulyoudubbulyouDOT.) Thus, whilst I'm not advocating that we start pronouncing the letters as we name them, perhaps we shouldn't dub the phonetic alphabet a 'baby alphabet' but rather a 'rational alphabet' and ours the 'irrational'. If we needed the same system that the Hebrews needed to remember a cogent system of words then surely we should have an alphabet that names each letter after something beginning with that letter. (Apple, Ball, Cake, etc.) It may seem infantile at first, but remember that the Greeks - acclaimed as the developers of western thought - used a system not a million miles distant.

Gaz out.