Are the A B C Ds meaningless??

Sujatha Ratnala
4 min readOct 1, 2018

Unraveling the hidden mysteries behind the A- Z order of English Alphabets

Back in my middle school days at Bangalore, we were introduced to the tabular form of Indian Alphabets and the science behind the phonetics order. In the Indian system, SpellBee has no place as words are generally written the way they were pronounced.

English has become the mainstream language in the modern world. Be it in Sciences, Technology, Global communication or in the formative Education.. The first thing we were taught is A B C D E F G… G H I J K L M.. M N O P Q R S T.. U V W X Y Z..

I was some what curious if the English alphabets also had some rational in their ordering.. May be not logical, may be not scientific.. but it had to have a history.. Mentally I dismissed the thought.. May be this is for the Brits, the Europeans and the Language nerds of the Oxford.. Perhaps the Grandmaas in the West would be telling this to their lil ones..

In the world of Internet, geography has no barriers. I was so excited to get the direct answer from the researcher himself Sir Wim J Borsboom . It felt like a Eureka moment and it is unlikely that even the Information Scientists, Western Grandmaas and the Cambridge grads will be aware of this..

I made the puzzle below a few days back and shared it with few of my nerdy friends working in the Hi Tech Job Sector.. Did not give them any context like what I did now. Guess what .. Just about 2 people were able to guess it..

“ Ancient Code & Perfect Ordering was the very beginning .. With Distant Travel & Assembly Glitches I morphed !!

The Coding Geeks would downvote –Lack of Documentation, Legacy Maintenance, Quirky Patches and Bizarre Code !!

My order reigns in the Universe.. Need I say elementary l i t e r a l l y !!

I switched rows, I rotated, I generalized, I liberalized.. Lossy Coding & Entropy ?

Indian Wisdom & Matrix Inception, Order of Sounds & Brahmi Inspiration I sought..

This could be my History.. What am I ?”

You have the puzzle.. You have the answer.. Just try connecting the dots.

If you were able to digest the puzzle, I am happy for you..You are in the elite list of people to discover this connection. From the findings in the paper, it seems if we reverse engineer carefully, there is an 85 percent match between English Alphabet order and Sanskrit. Alphabets. Is n’t that a WoWWW !!

If all this sounded Greek and Latin no worries. I will try to untangle this mystery. A brief look into the Indian Alphabet Matrix.. [Note: Hindi/Gujarathi/Marathi/Telugu/Kannada languages also follow this matrix scheme]

The Science of Indian Alphabets

What are Sounds, Vowels and Consonants ? When there is a blast of air released from the mouth it produces Sounds. The first series of Sounds are the meditative sounds aka Vowels.. The lips take various shapes for different sounds but there is no path of obstruction inside the mouth.. Make these longish sounds in your mouths as if you were meditating. Aaaaa Eeeee Uuuu Oooo Iiiii !! These are Vowels for you as defined in the Sanskrit Grammar.. Asprushta, the contactless sounds..

Then we have the consonant sounds which are made due to subtle contacts in the mouth..

In the first row ka, kha, ga, gha a strong blast of air from the gut is like thrown out from the throat. car, curse, guard

In the second row ca cha ja jha the tongue touches the palette. Think of ca as in chair, jar if you are unfamiliar with Indian languages.

ta tha da dha the tongue rolls back further.. tall, doll

ta tha da dha na the tongue gently touches the teeth in the dental sounds. These sounds are not generally present in the western words. A few examples are ta(think) da(this)

pa pha ba bha ma.. The lips are in contact for these sounds park, party, bus, bark, march

I hope you have understood the concept of phonetic ordering of sounds. The English words were just for representation of the sounds.

But English does not look like this?

Well looks like after travel to distant land, the rows got shuffled and matrix got rotated by error. Remember there was no documentation at that time. Perhaps the information was carried in strips of paper. Think about it.. The vowel cluster a e i o u are not together but still repeat periodically. Lips sounds like b, f, m, p are also spread out periodically and not clustered like in Sanskrit..

And when the sense of organisation and structure got lost, there were generalisations, some errors, newer Greek alphabets and finally from 2D it became a linear script..

I just provided a snapshot of the transformation.. The below papers give a detailed account. I hope you enjoyed reading this article as much as I enjoyed putting it down.

References

https://www.academia.edu/36546819/Reverse_Engineering_the_Western_Alphabet_-_How_the_Western_Alphabets_Sequence_of_Letter_Phonemes_was_Modelled_after_an_Ancient_Indian_Abugida

--

--

Sujatha Ratnala

I write.. I weave.. I walk.. कवयामि.. वयामि.. यामि.. Musings on Patterns, Science, Linguistics, Sanskrit et al..