Is there a reason behind the ordering of letters in the English alphabet?

Question

Is there a reason behind the ordering of letters in the English alphabet? i.e. why are we taught “A,B,C,D,E,F,...,Z”? Why not “L,A,S,U,I,Z,...,C”?

I am asking this because, in some of the languages I know, I am told that the ordering of the letters in the alphabet is based on the ease with which they can be pronounced or the frequency with which they are used or depending on the part of the vocal cord that needs to be stressed to pronounce the letter.

Is there a similar rationale?

EDIT

You can see a couple of references for arrangement of letters in Sanskrit here and here.

Answer 1

The ABC order already existed in some form about 1400 BC, in the Ugaritic script, from which our alphabet is descended. From Wikipedia:

It is unknown whether the earliest alphabets had a defined sequence. Some alphabets today, such as the Hanuno'o script, are learned one letter at a time, in no particular order, and are not used for collation where a definite order is required. However, a dozen Ugaritic tablets from the fourteenth century BCE preserve the alphabet in two sequences. One, the ABCDE order later used in Phoenician, has continued with minor changes in Hebrew, Greek, Armenian, Gothic, Cyrillic, and Latin; the other, HMĦLQ, was used in southern Arabia and is preserved today in Ethiopic.[16] Both orders have therefore been stable for at least 3000 years.

The English alphabet comes from the Latin alphabet (it is even often still called the Latin alphabet), which in turn comes from the Greek alphabet. All modern alphabets are most probably in some way descended from the Proto-Sinaitic alphabet, which probably originated around 2100-1800 BC, but whose ordering is unknown. The Greek alphabet developed from Proto-Sinaitic through Phoenician. Many times in between Proto-Sinaitic and English, letters have been added and removed. W, U, and J are among the most recent additions, which did not exist in classical Latin.

The first letters or proto-letters were taken by the Proto-Sinaitic alphabet from non-alphabetic Egyptian hieroglyphs, which were mostly ideograms, small depictions of objects. Note that these hieroglyphs were used in an entirely different way—the Egyptians didn't use them as alphabetical letters—, and so the order in Egyptian doesn't tell us much about the order in alphabets. Perhaps there was a logical sequence in those earliest forms, but that is unknown; it might very well be an arbitrary order. For all practical purposes, the modern order is best considered meaningless, though fixed.

Note that the Arabic script is also descended from Phoenician, and its alphabet uses the same order similar to our own.

Answer 2

The ancient Greek Ionian numerals used the position of a letter in the Greek alphabet for its value, i.e. αʹ = 1, βʹ = 2, γʹ = 3, etc.

This is evidence Greek letters had a fixed sequence as of the 4th century BC. As @Cerberus pointed out, the sequence was carried into the Latin, and hence English, alphabet.

Answer 3

Interestingly, there does seem to be some logic and planning behind the distribution of the vowels. Whether the consonants also show any planning in their distribution is not quite so clear, though I think there are signs of intentional regularity and grouping of the consonants.

Firstly, the vowels occur at almost regular intervals:

A BCD E FGH I JKLMN O PQRST U XYZ

The regularity becomes more evident if we write the alphabet as the Romans wrote it. They had no J or K; they wrote V, not U; they had no W; and I think they had no X, Y or Z. Thus:

A BCD E FGH I LMN O PQRST V

They used V for a sound that was sometimes "oo" and sometimes "w", so to them V was a vowel. All the other vowels are separated by 3 consonants; maybe they put the vowel V at the end instead of after R so that the alphabet began and ended with a vowel?

Secondly, there seems to be some intentional logic in the order of those vowels (A E I O U), when pronounced as the Romans did, and as most European languages still pronounce them: it follows at least approximately a circuit around the mouth. The vowels are partly defined by where the forward hump of the tongue is. Roman A had the hump of the tongue drawn back and low down; Roman E had the hump forward and medium high; Roman I had the hump about as far forward and high as it could go; Roman O and V (the latter pronounced oo) had the hump further back, but I am a bit vague about how far back and how high or low.

Thirdly, I think there are some weak signs of planning in the order and grouping of the consonants. BC (the C being pronounced /k/, not /s/ in Roman times) compares with FG: B is a bilabial plosive, F has at times been pronounced as bilabial approximant, meaning it has at least sometimes been pronounced by simply blowing through slightly parted lips. (In fact this is how Dr Johnson in his 1755 Dictionary of the English Language describes the pronunciation of F in the English of his day!!). C is a voiceless velar plosive, G (in the Roman /g/ pronunciation as in the English word "get") is a voiced velar plosive. How D might be compared to H I do not know. Then L, M and N are all voiced sounds that can be pronounced continuously with no sound change. (I do not know how a linguist would express that ...) Finally, P, Q, R, S and T may just be a collection of left-over consonants. The appearance of logic in the arrangement of the consonants seems decidedly less convincing to me than for the vowels, but that may be due to the difficulty of arranging consonants in any kind of order, especially before the days of X-rays, since no one could see inside anyone's mouth to be sure what was going on.

Answer 4

Egyptian hieroglyphs were narrowed down to less than 30-ish, and other people like the Greeks narrowed it down even further as they did not use some letters. Z used to be next to G (or instead of), so when it was re-added it was added to the end. This may be of interest.